


The Uncreated Planet

by thatsrightdollface



Series: Either the World is Broken, or it's Just a Road Trip AU [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Chucklevoodoos, Found Family, Friendship, Heists, M/M, Multi, Necromancy, Prophesies, Revolution, Sequel, backdoor passages between realities, established relationships - Freeform, glitch universe, good luck everybody, headcanons, in a really broad sense, road trip au, space travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-01-29 11:55:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 51,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12630519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Following up a while after what happened in "The Juggling Eclipse," Gamzee Makara and the Red Team have a job to do.  This job involves a lot of restless space ghosts - (some of them friendlier than others) - a great deal of sneaking around in disguises and, of course, a planet that shouldn't exist.(Thank you to all the people who requested a sequel in the "The Juggling Eclipse" comments!  I hope you have fun with this continued adventure. :D  Starting now (February 2018,) I'm gonna be trying my best to update this at least once a week unless otherwise noted.  I'm planning to go for every Sunday.)





	1. Let's do this.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey!! So, I hope you enjoy this ridiculous ride I have planned out~ I'm definitely gonna try to do all the characters justice. Please forgive any mistakes I make! Have a wonderful day!

The trouble wasn’t so much that Gamzee Makara and the rest of the Red Team had to land on a Messiahs-forsaken moon the Empress hadn’t even bothered to flood, trying to hunt down a replacement part for their ship the way a Subjugglator might be sent to pry unfunny blasphemers out of hiding and drag them all hysterimurderous to the foot of the Grand Highblood’s throne…  It was that it had been so long everybody kind of knew the motherfucking part they needed wasn’t going to turn up in any of the ruins at all.  They’d probably have to get to raiding another Alternian Empire outpost.  Aradia had risked chatting with a bunch of pissed off alien ghosts, and yeah.  Never even heard of “ship cloaks,” nevermind the tiny zapper thingies or whatever Equius needed to make one go.

Gamzee’d been helping Team Charge – that was Tavros and Aradia’s old FLARP-ing duo name – harvest useful shit from some smashed up, Alternian-radiation smeared cities when Karkat called them all back home.  That ship was a better hive than Gamzee’s empty beach had ever been, honestly.  There were pieces of all his friends waiting around everywhere, like the ship was a painting they’d all worked on together, so many hands smearing blood-paint in different, baffling ways.  Gamzee and Karkat’s own respite block had a nice movie-watching system set up, and hooks to keep Karkat’s film collection from tumbling around and cracking apart whenever the ship rocked. 

Some of Gamzee’s Jokers Card posters had made it onboard, too, and Karkat had only complained about them a little bit, near the beginning, when he was still all jittery tapping feet and arms wrapped tightly around himself, scanning the sky for imperial drones.  Before the ship took off, brother, and they drifted out so far past Alternia’s spinning moons.

And there were the others, too, leaving their marks around everyplace – those Blue Team motherfuckers they’d have to miss until they got done with their mysterious job out so far beyond their planet.  Sollux had helped Equius set up most of the computer systems in the helm, for instance, and he’d tried to resist his red/blue thing up until the last minute when he decided fuck it, they might as well have tangles of breathing, twitching wires straight from his own hive.  Sollux had given them his best, see, and Eridan had leaned over his shoulder suggesting bombastic names for all the ship’s weapon settings until his kismesis caved and started typing them in.  And Nepeta had shown Equius how to set up a proper shipping wall in one of the more tucked-away hallways, too.  She’d laugh-cried all messily when he hmphed his way through the process, pairing most of their friends up with strings of question marks.  She’d buried her face in his chest and held him close – all that righteous palemance noise – and Karkat had hurried Gamzee away.  Wrapping an arm around him tight; telling him it was rude to stare. 

Gamzee slept suspended in buzzing, sick-sweet sopor slime, just as always, but it didn’t feel like it used to.  He was close enough to stretch out and pull Karkat closer, now.  His moirail had gotten used to how he looked waking up without clown paint in the evening, even, and he’d commented all softly when the sopor-withdrawal bruises started fading from around Gamzee’s temples and under his eyes. 

Aradia was scooping up pieces of a shattered tablet while Gamzee held the pillar that had smashed it propped up over a huge highblood shoulder when their exposure suits jolted with Karkat’s message.

“IF THE FUCKING SHIP PART ISN’T HERE, IT’S STUPID THAT WE STILL ARE.  MEETING IN TEN.  TAVROS, GET THOSE OTHER WANNABE TROLL INDIANA JONES-ES BACK IN NOW.”

Karkat knew Tavros was the best at keeping on motherfucking task.  He always got extra stressed out and prickly when they sent teams waltzing right back into Alternian hotspots, and that shit was even worse since the time some Subjugglators had unquestioningly drawn Gamzee in as one of their own and carted him off on one of their church faction’s carnival ships.  Field missions had been fucking terrifying, and it had taken Gamzee nights and nights to lose the rubber snapping hilarity of his murder voice when he finally shook them and got back home.  He’d kept assuring Karkat he hadn’t just run around subjugglating everybody, and he’d only done what he had to so’s they didn’t get wise and cull him.  Karkat, in turn, kept reminding everybody else that Gamzee wasn’t supposed to be unsupervised on Alternian city-ships anymore. 

Tavros snickered nervously and raised his eyebrows up at Gamzee from behind his foggy exposure suit mask. 

“Got it, brother,” Gamzee drawled, setting the pillar down nice and gentle so no more ghosts scolded Aradia. 

Tavros nodded, satisfied.  He and Aradia were planning to paste that tablet thingy back together as a favor for one of those ghosts, but there were just so many heartbroken souls rattling around that place.

They turned, Tavros in his hoverchair and Aradia counting tablet pieces under her breath to make sure they’d gotten all the important ones.  They headed back towards their ship, which wasn’t really too far away.  A “meeting in ten” was probably pushing it a little, though. 

The ship was insectoid and bent like all those other hissing, starved Alternian ships, but Equius had powered it up completely to make up for the lack of a resident psionic-made-engine.  A motherfucker could tell it in the way the thing rumbled, idling tucked away in the shadow of what might’ve been some sort of doomed alien worship circus.  The spires had been sharp and deadly, once, stabbing at the sky to draw blood.  They were carved to look like a dead alien’s hollow bones, balanced like building blocks and sealed together with something inky dark and a hundred different colors at the same time.  Like spilled oil.

(When Gamzee had offered that description to Eridan during one of their halting, crackly video conversations, Eridan had told him he knew his ‘it was a motherfucking miracle’ voice by that point and he should bite his dirty litterbug tongue.  It was just _so like_ a land dwelling highblood to focus on the shifting, woozy rainbows in oil.)

Equius had accidentally snapped one of the zigzag incline steps heading up on to their ship-hive when he was building the thing – Gamzee always skipped that one on his way inside.  The porthole whirred and coughed its way open, latches like spines bristling against the poisoned air.  There were still paper cutout Alternian moons hung in the entryway, plastered next to some paper stars.  Tavros and Gamzee had set that up together when they’d been traveling through a patch of the deadest space, with nothing around but cold rock and ancient, misplaced alien communication frequencies none of them could understand.  They still hung out under those moons together, sometimes, when the others got busy.  Tavros told Gamzee about new space-born folktales he and Aradia had gathered traveling; he read on a tablet loaded full of fantasy stories while Gamzee painted in a buttery notebook Karkat had saved for him.

Gamzee only thought about kissing Tavros every now and then, lately.  He’d painted him a bunch of times, though.  Only a few of his very best paintings ever got torn out and hung anywhere, but Gamzee always felt a dizzy heat chase through him whenever Karkat chose something of his to display.  To want. 

The notebooks were left over from the road trip Gamzee and some of his friends had taken not too long ago, and in a way the spinning paper cutout moons were, too.  They’d gone to see the Juggling Eclipse together, after all – an impossible joke the universe played every now and then.  All twelve of them had sat underneath that miraculous hilarity, together for the first time.  They’d made their plans and spoken their heresies.  Feferi Peixes, young maybe-Empress-to-be, had promised to make the most of the incomplete glitch that was their reality.  Without the callings Gamzee felt like a sopor withdrawal tremor through his blood…  Without the lives some of them half-remembered, the lives Gamzee dreamt about whenever he jolted awake feeling like he was going to throw up.

And they had all promised with Feferi, too, brother.  They were all gonna get culled for the same motherfucking crime, now, if they got culled at all.  Not mutation, not paralysis, not anything but motherfucking treason.

Feferi was going to become something beyond herself, beyond giggling bubbles up from the deep ocean and raising pet cuttlefish and the golden bangles she wore jabbed through her ear fins.  Something primal and terrifying enough to cull Her Imperious Condescension.  Half of their number were supposed to go off to a planet that shouldn’t exist to get some heroes that could help her do her thing.  Help them all wrestle down the Heiress, and her drones, and her laughing armies.  That meant Gamzee, motherfucker.  The Red Team. 

The second – and last – time all Gamzee’s friends had been together was just before their ship lifted away from Alternia.  Feferi had chosen a patch of sea where nobody went to do it from, and Equius had murmured breathy, false-apologetic complaints too much of the time to show everybody just how much he hated being out on the water. 

Not a lot of fish trolls went out to where Feferi lived, when she wasn’t holding an Heiress-y ball of some shit like that.  The ocean had been still as Gamzee figured an ocean could be – all the cannon fire and corpses bobbing around after pirate attacks were off somewhere else.  A ghostly, far away lusus spun lazy circles through the dark water.  Karkat hadn’t blurred his eyes with sopor for most of his sweeps, so when he noticed Gamzee staring he whispered that it wasn’t his seagoat guardian.  Gamzee had finally been able to look away, then, and Karkat linked their pinkies together for just a second.  A silent, pale-as-fuck promise that was better without words.

Karkat, Terezi and Equius were all waiting at the council table by the time Gamzee and Team Charge peeled their exposure suits off and got decontaminated enough that the ship would let them all the way inside.  Karkat’s fingers were steepled the way he’d seen leaders do in movies, and Equius was fiddling with part of a meal block equipment piece Terezi had broken a few nights back.  He seemed a lot more comfortable being at a circular table than he had at first, when he’d freaked out about sitting at the same level as a highblood like Gamzee _and_ a mutant like Karkat both at the same time.  It had been almost too much for his elitist, “we’re all cogs in some crazy motherfucking machine” mindset to take.  Looked okay now, though, thank the Messiahs.

“Okay, everyone’s finally back.  Good job, Tavros,” Karkat said.  He caught Gamzee’s eye and his lip twisted up a little – he pulled out a chair Gamzee knew was meant for him.  Karkat’s irises had almost completely filled up with red, by that point.  Raw and bright and illegal, the kind of blood the Grand Highblood couldn’t possibly have painting up his holy throne room.  The kind of eyes Gamzee imagined looking at him softly just before he fell asleep.  He took a couple heavy, slouching steps over to his chair.

“Did you find your crumbly rock?” Terezi asked Aradia, tossing her one of those signature wild smiles that was mostly fangs. She was fanning herself with a star map bunched up between her claws.

“Most of it,” said Aradia, unloading the newly-sanitized tablet pieces out on the table in front of them.  The ghost’s handwriting was blocky and jumbled together but carved very deep.  Gamzee thought he would’ve known it was written with purpose even if its owner _wasn’t_ begging for it to be put back together from the afterlife.

“So - so what’s the plan?” asked Tavros, swinging his chair around so he was sitting next to Equius.  He had a pack of steaming, just-heated rations out in front of him already – when the fuck had he even gone to get that?  Gamzee still caught himself spacing out, sometimes, but it didn’t happen so often since he’d kicked sopor.  The beetle legs in Tavros’s food were twitching, but it was advertised on the package that they would do that.  Some kind of fancy, tingling sauce or whatever, for homier flavor.  The Empress’s hordes had to spend most their time off conquering worlds for her, after all. 

Tavros handed Aradia a troll fork, too, and Gamzee flopped down next to Karkat.  The way his moirail snorted and waved his hand in front of Gamzee’s face probably meant he’d been staring at those tablet pieces for a while, there.  Not long enough to scare Karkat or anything, but long enough that he’d put his fucking rotted pan on display again.  He hadn’t used to notice so much, which was probably _also_ because of the slime.        

“The closest operating Alternian base from here is really uptight,” Terezi offered, shrugging. She spread the star map out over Aradia’s tablet pieces.  It looked a little like their galaxy folded and dipped, then, like there were dark mountains in the void.  “‘Uptight’ as in it’s mostly a bunch of highbloods tasked with maintaining a prison colony.  Awaiting trials and public cullings.  All that.”  She snickered, shaking her head.  “It might be a little _too convenient_ , if they caught us around there.  We wouldn’t even cost them transport fuel...  Sucks for the rebellion.”

“Aw, shit,” Gamzee laughed.  He tossed his smile back and forth between Karkat and Terezi, showing how awake he was.  “Can’t be having that.  Empire has to at least lose some motherfucking gas money on us.”

“It’s only fair,” Terezi agreed.  “So, I guess we’re going to have to send people back a little.  Again.  A city-ship has been broadcasting what it thinks are sneaky, masked signals out into space, coming in from around that planet with the people who built themselves bodies out of whatever other species left behind.  Remember that one?”

“That was amazing,” said Aradia.

"And fucking unhygienic,” Karkat noted.  “They were all pissy when I let them know what load gapers were actually for, but I think we can all agree I did them a favor.”

“The jury will be forever out on that one,” Terezi said.  She was walking her fingers along the star map, from their location off into unfriendly space.  She’d let Gamzee paint her claws in red and teal stripes during an especially boring patch of travel time, and not all the polish had flecked off yet.  A younger Terezi might have ended up licking it.  “But as far as that city-ship goes – what we’re actually _supposed_ to be talking about, right? – I sniffed its signals out while you guys were gone.  Not so sneaky after all!  And this is where Nepeta and I would describe me – a ferocious intergalactic dragon, of course – hunting down measly city-ship prey.”

“She has shown me some of your intergalactic dragon chat logs,” Equius said, voice purring and low, contented now that they were talking about Nepeta.  He didn’t look up from the broken curls of metal he was fiddling with.  The thick, drippy blue shadows smeared under his eyes deepened when he tipped his head.  “Some are almost poetry.”

“Aren’t they though?” Terezi laughed her shattered-glass laugh.  She started describing an especially poetic, star-murdering scene from the intergalactic dragon roleplay logs, until Karkat reminded her that she’d just gotten on his case for changing the subject.  The Red Team still had to do their motherfucking job, getting out of their universe and into one that had even less business being real.

“Uh, you’re sending Aradia and Gamzee this time, right?” Tavros asked.  “I think that’s what you said in the last memo…”

“We haven’t used their act in a while,” Terezi said.  “Not since Gamzee went MIA for a few nights.  Figured it was time to dust it off.”

Karkat made a “tsk”-ing sound, and Gamzee knew it was taking a lot of his self-control to keep from complaining about all the potential flaws in Gamzee and Aradia’s “act.”  It absolutely ate him up inside that he couldn’t get sent on any of these scavenging missions.  Everybody knew it, just the way they knew he’d kept on writing romantic screenplays.  (Just with more of them set in space.) 

There were only so many ways to hide Karkat’s eyes, though, to mask the uncanny warmth of his skin.  Going a little stir-crazy, on that same ship so much of the motherfucking time. 

Gamzee asked if there was anything he could bring Karkat back from the city-ship, anything he could snag after they liberated whatever little zappy piece it was that would get their ship cloak working again.  Karkat said that first off, he was glad Aradia at least could remember the technical names for things.  And secondly, Gamzee could just get his own ass back home this time.  Without any panicked nights, or avoidable new traumas.  If he could just go one away mission without making Karkat feel like his blood pusher might explode that would be swell. 

Gamzee chuckled low in his throat.  He wasn’t sure he had anything good to say back to that.  Karkat, man.  That motherfucker had a way with words.  “Fuck, brother.  I’ll try?”

So that meant after a little sleep and a little gathering their shit together, Gamzee, Aradia and Equius – who was probably the best getaway driver in the history of Alternian Space – would go try and steal their way off of that dead moon.  Aradia figured she could work on the ghost’s tablet on their way, and Karkat finally dragged Gamzee in close by his sleeve and whispered that he’d like some sort of new movie.  Even if it was terrible, just something new.

Gamzee said he should consider that motherfucking wish as good as granted.


	2. How many other faces are we gonna have to wear?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, so!! Welcome to chapter 2. Sorry this one is so, so long… I kind of got carried away. Lots of Alternian Empire ideas and headcanons floating around in here… Basically, this is a heist episode. :P I hope you enjoy it! Sorry again for anything I got wrong. Thank you for reading!

Gamzee and Aradia’s act together was pretty simple.  They’d got it down okay by then, and she was cool with treating it mostly like a game.  Said he was easier to work with than Equius, for “obvious reasons…”  _And_ it could win them an “in” with both those highbloods trained to think some nonsense hemospectrum made them all hilarious and divine as well as the lowbloods who always had to choke back out their true thoughts because of that same motherfucking blood thing.  Couldn’t even say whether a joke was funny or not without getting culled.  What kind of circus demanded that people laugh?  Force-feeding jokes the same way Subjugglators sometimes got heretics to eat the kind of popcorn that would explode in their throats and splatter meat everywhere.  Fuck.   Ask some history buff motherfucker like Eridan about “Trizza Tethis,” and a brother’d see that shit’s not new.  Not for thousands of sweeps, not since some weird stuff Feferi had tried explaining happened and Alternia got made.  _Her Imperious Condescension_ got made. 

Gamzee didn’t think on that part as much as he thought he probably should have, though he dreamed about what was missing in their universe more and more now that he’d kicked sopor.  Those vents with his own staring face reflected back, for instance, and a stranger’s blue plastic eyes watching him.  His soul split down the middle, one half familiar and the other warped and ancient and laughing in the sort of way that fucked up universes – but both sides were still and forever his own, somehow.  Made Gamzee’s motherfucking head pound.    

Karkat had nightmares, too.  They had feelings jams about it, sometimes.

But back to Gamzee and Aradia’s act.  That’s what they had to get motherfucking doing that night, to put their ship back together.  Aradia would pin all her bouncy, tangled curls up in a slicked-down butler bun and she’d keep her face steady, almost empty as one of her alien graves.  (Gamzee kind of thought burying the dead like some other motherfuckers did was wasteful, what with lususes to feed and all that good paint you’d be losing, but each to their own he always said.)  She’d wear a snappy suit Kanaya had made her back during their planning stages, and lower her voice to a knowing, sometimes sarcastic purr. 

Apparently the other butlers loved it when she subtly rolled her eyes behind Gamzee’s back, and then he refused to let any of the other highbloods around cull her.  Stubbornly none the wiser.  She’d said Gamzee was good at playing the fool, and Karkat had sounded kind of proud when he shot back, “Yeah, no shit.”

Gamzee would commit some quiet motherfucking blasphemy, for his part – he’d pray in a sing-song half-voice the whole time he spent designing himself a new face.  Gonna pretend to be a different clown.  That night, Equius had talked him into something old-fashioned, with a spindly smirking mouth painted on dark and swirls over his eyelids.  To represent seeing the gods’ work, motherfucker.  You know how it was.  He had righteous clubs strapped over his back, and a deck of cards to fidget with if he forgot what to do with his hands.  Nobody said much of anything when a pan-rotted clown swayed into shit or accidentally stomped on someone’s foot, but Gamzee didn’t want his sopor-blurry eyes to be the only thing people remembered about him.  There could only be so many sopor-addict Subjugglators that far out in the Empress’s space, after all.

It was hard to give himself a new, lying face, but Gamzee worshipped the Messiahs that had helped teach him to prize brotherhood.  The twin jester-gods he’d given all his sweeps and fizzing grape sugar blood to would have understood wanting to keep his friends alive, he convinced himself, except that he’d definitely get culled by the rest of his church for it.  Except that last part, brother.

But Karkat was worth it, and changing their gory giggling church was worth it, too.  Gamzee had a calling, sort of, and he felt almost like he could give anything for a calling like that.  It might not have been his divine purpose in their other, unbroken worlds, but it was a start. 

Gamzee was done painting on his face when Karkat came in to see him – wasn’t too long before they’d have to go, by that point.  Equius was getting the little escape-pod ship they’d be using primed to travel out of the planet’s atmosphere, and Aradia was buried super-deep in runes trying to translate the ghost’s creepy smashed tablet so she could piece it back together.  Gamzee’d thought he’d get in a little time smashing Equius’s practice robots with those clubs he wore, just in case.  He hoped Karkat would be able to tell just how much he wanted to get home – like, back to their motherfucking ship – in the way he moved.  The force he used against those poor chunks of metal that never hurt a Messiahs-damned soul.  He imagined he was fighting his way off the city-ship, ready to bring Tavros back his moirail.  Ready to get Equius back to Nepeta.  Ready to tell Karkat how scared he’d been, if he was scared…  But only Karkat, so his palemate knew how much it mattered to be able to say that shit. 

Karkat stood propped against the doorway to the training room for a little while, watching Gamzee spin a club and then crush a robot’s head off almost too quick to see.  He wrapped his arms around himself, and Gamzee watched him shift to get comfortable out of the corner of his eye.  He did a few fancy fucking juggler moves, then – juggled one of the robotic limbs for a second there, too – and finally stopped, panting, when it looked like Karkat was getting bored.       

“I packed you some extra back-up maps, since you could get lost in your own hive,” Karkat announced.  It was in one of his softer voices.  He was nervous.

“Thanks, brother,” Gamzee said.  “How’s this paint?  Keep it, or change?”

“This is okay,” Karkat said.  One time, when Gamzee’d been in a creative mood, he’d tried out an especially smeary makeup look.  Like his own, sort of, but falling off and frantic.  Karkat had freaked out a little, seeing it.  Said he dreamt of Gamzee with paint like that, and it was never good.

So now, Gamzee figured it couldn’t hurt to make sure. 

They walked together away from the training room and back to their own, then.  To get changed up.  To get ready to go.  Gamzee linked a few of his fingers through a few of Karkat’s as they went.  Not holding on so tight Karkat would have to feel how sweaty his hands got clutching those juggling clubs, but holding on all the same. 

Karkat and Terezi had managed to link up a little communication with Alternia.  Not for too long, but enough that they’d heard Sollux make fun of Eridan’s extra-swooshy new haircut and Nepeta complain about finding beasts terrifying enough to send Feferi after for training practice.  It was homey, imagining what the Blue Team was up to across so much gaping space.  Karkat chuckled low and secret, telling Gamzee about their friends.  He helped him pick out the fancy circus clothes this stranger clown with the old-fashioned makeup and actual butler might wear. 

And then he let Gamzee kiss his cheek, leaving a smudge of paint over his grey skin.  Karkat didn’t even bother wiping that paint away as they went to the shuttle bay place, ship whirring and chittering in its mechanical, insectoid voice all around them.  Equius was waiting already, and Aradia would wander over soon enough, still wrestling hair pins.    

“Tavros was helping me get our alphabet key steady,” she announced when she made it, “For the ghost’s tablet.  He found a mistake I made interpreting punctuation symbols, already, so…  Bam!  There.”

The butler outfit made Aradia seem far more delicate and okay with ironing than Gamzee knew she wanted to be, though she’d left the front of her button-down hanging open to reveal a FLARP-ing t-shirt she and Tavros had won from someplace.  That thing had seen some shit – it had been burned and torn and probably wrestled out of a murder lusus’s mouth or whatever.  But she’d brought it up to fucking space, anyway.  Good old Aradia. 

“That’s all well and good,” said Equius, arms crossed behind his back, bruised blue shadows under his eyes looking damp and cold as the cliffside workshops he’d left behind back on Alternia.  “But if you could take a seat and focus on the mission at hand, it would be…  Preferable.”

Equius was weird with Aradia in a different way than he was weird with Gamzee.  He tilted his chin back when he talked to her and made sure to keep his teeth bared, even if plenty of them were missing and a lot of them had been ground down so they weren’t even sharp.  Gamzee thought it was fucking perfect how Aradia stared right back up at him, unflinching, eyebrows jerked up as if she thought he was kind of sad and funny.  Gamzee wasn’t sure he would’ve been able to do any of that shit, if Equius gave him those condescending highblood eyes.

That wasn’t to say Equius wasn’t still fucking weird as a clown that didn’t like the joke murdermirth gospels, when it came to Gamzee.  He was the reason pretty much all his stranger clown personas ended up with names and backstories, after all.  Equius said roleplaying them would help him stay in character, and Gamzee said sure, why the fuck not.  He suspected Equius got more out of the practice than the knowledge that his friend – probably “friend?” – might not get culled for forgetting what name was on his fake ID.  Honestly, Gamzee was still trying to sort out how he felt about all that.  It was sticky and too close when Equius called him by those new names he’d chosen – it was a queasy, burning thing to feel like Equius would still rather have some other brother around than him.

But then, Equius obsessed over vague curls of Gamzee’s lip, over shit he said that he wouldn’t even remember later.  And he’d stopped calling him “Highblood” all the time.  Well, except for when he wanted to make Gamzee really mad, and they both knew things were going to be alright between them later. 

One time, Karkat had asked what Gamzee would say if Equius got up the nerve to confess hate to him, and Gamzee hadn’t known what the motherfuck to say.  He’d spent so long trying to be Equius’s bro, it would piss him off to know that stuck-up motherfucker had never even tried to see him that way.  And maybe that turn in his stomach when Equius stared at him too long was hate, or maybe it was something more like remembered loneliness.  A grey beach, a missing lusus, and a world that was just so fucking quiet all the time unless Gamzee took it upon himself to splash a little color around.  If Equius had really hated him even back then, maybe he wouldn’t have felt so alone.

“Why doesn’t he just ask me himself?” Gamzee had said.  “Or else he could ask out one of my fake IDs.  Seems more into them, to be real with you.”

Gamzee had been surprised by how bitter he sounded.  Karkat had laughed a little and rubbed his back until he calmed down, hands small and warm and gentler than Gamzee felt he deserved right about then.

For now, though, he reminded Karkat he was pale for him, in a slow, drifting voice that was kind of the opposite of how he got when the rage came for him.  Karkat liked that voice.  He snapped back that Gamzee had better come home soon and put his real face back on. 

It meant a lot, honestly, that Karkat was looking forward to seeing him the way he was supposed to be again.  Had his motherfucking paint memorized, and could pick out the changes from across a room.  That was a pretty damn pale thing to say to a clown, and Karkat knew it, too. 

The flight through unfriendly space and to the Alternian city-ship was pretty uneventful.  Aradia worked on her translations until she saw how Gamzee was fidgeting and offered to chill with him for a little while.  Then they’d worked at teaching a couple of their more portable Fiduspawn some tricks for an epic talent show championship Tavros had planned for them.  Equius piloted, glowering and frustratingly steady.  Gamzee tried to pretend he didn’t notice Equius watching him as he got his Fiduspawn buddy to balance stuff on its little nose and shit.  That guy knew the drill, of course – Gamzee and Aradia would pass him over their Fiduspawn and other important inventory things before they slipped in where they weren’t wanted.  He’d hold down the fort until he had to get the fuck out, with or without them. 

Equius had been training Terezi to deal with ship maintenance stuff, but it would still be a fucking stupid blow to their revolution if he didn’t keep careful out past enemy lines. 

Their modified escape pod thingy had a crazy good cloak on, even if the one on the actual ship had gone off to the dark carnival beyond.  Equius was able to slide up to the city-ship easy enough, and they sealed up against its hulking side like a barnacle along some whale lusus’s back. 

Most Alternian city-ships flew only the Condesce’s colors, but this one had the seals of a few notorious seadweller generals branded along its skin, too, like a deadly promise.  Gamzee snapped a picture for Eridan, who still knew more about all that shit than it felt like most people would want to.  The ship had the sort of weapons systems that could flood and/or melt a planet to gristly space goo, if need be, and plates that shifted along its back like a murder-y space-faring beetle. 

A single glassy eye stared up from along the city-ship’s spine, and Gamzee knew there would be a glittering highblood pavilion just on the other side of that window.  Trees from Alternia would be recreated there in gold, hanging with crystalline fruit that could have provided cash for a lowblood and at least three quadrant mates for the better part of a sweep.  Looking up at the window from inside, space would seem miraculously transformed into whatever else the highbloods wanted – maybe waves with eerie moonlight trickling through, maybe Alternia’s own motherfucking sky, all nighttime clouds like berry sherbet. 

The normal trolls’ quarters wouldn’t even see that shit, though.  Equius aimed below _them_ , even, when getting all adjusted.  He pressed a handful of blinking buttons and the side of their ship squelched into a gooey film, a portal they could squint through and get to spying on the other side.  

All dark space, brother, dripping vents and the kind of bioluminescent, whispering mold that clung to the underside of such a monstrous place’s pipes.  Pulsing, fleshy cords ran through the room, too, sizzling with a psionic helmsman’s power.  There would be at least a dozen helmsmen plugged in throughout the stinking guts of that place, the ship’s meat strung in with their own veins and strangling their bones.  They would breathe with the ship and feel it rumbling and drifting and all other shit Gamzee figured ships did, and when they died they would be sliced out and replaced like a worn-down cog in some Subjugglator’s merry murder-go-round.  They would take turns moving that huge, huge place from star system to star system until they were all used up. 

Gamzee thought he heard one of those helmsmen screaming, not too far away.  He remembered Sollux for a second, Sollux with his snide sense of humor and resigned, knowing terror.  He had always known he’d end up somebody’s battery, like this, until they’d started up an impossible plan to say “Fuck you” to all that noise or die.  Sollux had changed, since Feferi’s revolution.  Since _all their_ motherfucking revolution.  He’d started shaking off that battleship shadow that had followed him since he got hatched. 

Once they decided the coast was clear, though, Gamzee and Aradia shoved themselves through the sticky, shuddering membrane Equius had opened up between the ships.  Gamzee’s footsteps were loud on that damp maintenance room floor.  Aradia nudged him like, “Go that way, now, brother,” and he shambled off all silent as he could, tripping just a little on his oversized funny shoes.  They had candy-striped knives in the toes, and laces that twirled like curly fries. 

Gamzee had been on plenty of Alternian ships, by that point, but he was cool with letting Aradia pick where to find their missing piece.  She was like Troll Robin Hood, kinda – Aradia snuck past all the battle ships and shit, usually, going after some highblood’s leisure cruiser.  She said it made her feel better to know stealing part of one of those ships probably wouldn’t get a bunch of helpless foot soldiers killed.  Probably wouldn’t get anybody killed, because those leisure ships didn’t usually fly anyplace dangerous…  And whoever owned them would have enough money to get it fixed up again easy.  Gamzee thought that was a good way of looking at things.  Didn’t really have any better ideas.

They headed on up to the city-ship’s main roads, making sure to walk like they knew what the fuck they were doing.  Some of the pipes dripped down into Aradia’s hair, and she patted at it, wincing.  Didn’t want to fuck up those pins. 

The halls of that particular city-ship were bustling, once Gamzee and Aradia got up where all the people usually hung out.  The walls were crisp, shiny metal that still heaved with what seemed like breath.  There were shop stalls worked into some corridors and barracks into others – you know.  Everything was color-coded in smooth, unflinching neon, but Gamzee could walk pretty much wherever he wanted.  He’d told Equius he had no idea how to act like he was a better motherfucker than any other motherfucker, way back when, but highblood shit was ground in so deep – so _mercilessly_ – into every fucking thing Gamzee didn’t even have to act one way or another at all.  Lowblood battle pawns and butlers scuttled out of his way just the same, and he felt like he truly _was_ a ruinous part of the Empress’s machine.  He’d been hatched to keep Her Imperious Condescension’s order, Equius had always said, but since when were clowns about “Order,” anyway? 

Since that first Grand Highblood, brother.  Since that first mirthless and bleeding sell-out to tyranny.  If Gamzee hadn’t thought the hemospectrum was fucked up before now, he felt like he’d have had to change his mind the second he saw the fear on some lowblood motherfucker’s face when they looked him up and down and mouthed to their friend, “At least he’s not smiling.”  Nobody deserved to be so fucking afraid of a smile, or any other troll just walking by.

But that’s how shit was.  Gamzee could see it, now, like he’d only been able to imagine it vaguely from his own grey beach.  He swung his arms, knowing they were the sort that could strangle and stab and crunch bones up between his thick highblood fingers.  He turned down a new hallway whenever Aradia nudged him discreetly, keeping his eye out for movies he might be able to grab for Karkat. 

A Subjugglator with a bag full of different motherfuckers’ blood-clotted hands – some alien and some troll, it looked like – blew Gamzee a little kiss as they passed him by.  His sack was made of tied-together jump ropes, which Gamzee guessed he probably had equipped as one of his weapons.  A brave tealblood tried to sell him some gummy candy themed around the planet they were sailing towards, too, but Aradia gestured subtly, gently, that he should just look kind of smug and move his ass.    

They moved ass through cramped hallways that smelled like sizzling meat and engine oil, where midblood technicians stared at them from behind glowy neon slits in their doors…  And then past the sterile colder-than-cold mediculler labs, with samples of skin stitchwork and artificial limbs displayed twitching in polished jars like food on a menu.  When they passed a young man trying to carry too many of his highblood employer’s random weapons slung over his back, Aradia raised her eyebrows up to Gamzee.  He knew what that meant; he sauntered forward a little, shuffling sweaty cards between his long, long claws, and struck up a conversation with the blueblood who apparently needed just _that many_ decorative axes.  And needed them out of her inventory, too, so everyone could see them as she passed by…  Aradia hung behind and helped the poor manservant carry all that shit for a while.

That got them both the blueblood’s Trollian handle slipped against Gamzee’s palm with lots of shy head-ducking _and_ a pass on the elevator up to the rich motherfuckers’ rooms.  It also clued them in to what all was gonna be happening in just a little while, that night – an inspection.  They hadn’t actually been on a city-ship for an inspection, before, which was pretty motherfucking good ‘cause it meant some fancy seadweller guys came from battle-space and flooded the whole thing.  The entire ship would be submerged in a couple hours, and the seadwellers would drift around reminding everyone who was boss.  Flashing their deep-sea luminescence; typing notes into water-proof tablets on just about everything.  They’d peer into land dwellers’ sealed-off rooms, their ear fins fanning, gills speckled with violet just like Eridan’s.  If the ship wasn’t doing okay – doing how they wanted, bro – those seadwellers would cull the captain and figure out someone new to promote.  Then, they’d get the fuck out of dodge.

Gamzee shrugged back to Aradia, drawling something about how this had better not last as long as the _last_ inspection – haha, he couldn’t even swim out of his room to grab some take-out!

The blueblood giggled and flushed.  She remarked on how weird it was that he told jokes to his butler, but then mused that she probably should have expected as much from a clown.

They said their goodbyes, after a while, and the blueblood bowed low.  Gamzee considered bowing back – he was annoyed by the rush of frustration that came to him watching the woman trying to be all respectful, honestly.  It made his dopy, “let’s-make-friends” kinda smile stretch into something worse, for just a second.

Equius.  She reminded him of Equius just then.  Gamzee had to work a little harder to keep from teasing her, telling her, _“Didn’t I say you don’t have to fucking bow?  C’mon, bro, we’re on the same team.”_

Aradia thought they should head through some fancy official doors and up to a different level before doing their thing, stealing their ship piece.  Might make it a little harder to connect the dots, then, even if not by much.  They waited for the blueblood and her shambling, sweat-browed servant guy to turn a couple corners and then went on their way.   

The highblood suites had velvety, midnight-deep carpet through their hallways, and ethereal lusus-shaped robotic light fixtures Gamzee knew would look motherfucking ghostly as soon as the paths got flooded for inspection.  There were portraits of the Empress and her entourage conquering world after gold paint-splattered world lining the walls, and mirrors on the ceiling so Gamzee could look up and see his own stranger’s paint, his own tangled curls.  He didn’t recognize his expression for a second, which reminded him of some of his worst dreams.

They finally got their ship piece from some motherfucker’s second, smaller leisure ship.  Yeah, the guy had _multiple_ leisure ships, with their garages stuffed in where other people’s rooms probably would have gone otherwise.  Some bigwig, probably.  Might not even notice the part was gone.  Gamzee waited with one of his clubs drawn and swinging loosely in his claws, but he didn’t have to bash anybody’s brains in just yet.  The garage had been empty, smelling like so many chemical cleaners that Aradia kind of gagged. 

She found what they needed and slipped it into her inventory, though, of course, chortling the way she might have back during a FLARP-ing session with Tavros.  It wasn’t until they turned back to the main hallway, towards the elevator, that they heard the announcement rattling through all the city-ship’s speakers.

The inspection had come early – those seadweller officials had just kind of turned up whenever it felt right, which Gamzee might have respected if it didn’t mean water was already being released into some of the lowblood areas.  One minute the fancy trolls’ halls seemed serene and lofty, and the next there were people shoving past them to get to their rooms.  Somebody grabbed Aradia’s arm and tried to throw her out of his way, at one point, and Gamzee didn’t even think before his arm jerked up and cracked a club against the back of the guy’s neck.  The sorry asshole dropped like a sack of rock candy bricks, and Gamzee watched while a couple of his friends dragged him into a leisure ship garage and slammed the door shut.

Gamzee flinched.  Hopefully Karkat wouldn’t think that was just _too easy_ for him, but at least Aradia was still standing. 

“This is… Something,” Aradia said, and Gamzee said at least it was better than that one time when the battleship they were looting got overrun with alien rebel forces.  It was probably good everyone was so fucking busy being loud and out of it, he realized later.  Shouldn’t run his mouth off out in Alternian space, brother.  Gamzee _knew_ that rule.  Fucking obvious, but Aradia didn’t speak an unmirthful word about sopor rot.  She just held on to his arm, and steered them towards any kind of empty hallway.  They were going out through the vents again.  Not the first time.  

Nobody said shit about a clown knocking some motherfucker right the fuck out, either.  Actually, there were other unconscious bodies along those halls as they got farther down, some kicked just a little out of the way.  People looked nervous that Gamzee was there, if anything.  There was a clown with a cocky question mark painted on her cheek charging a toll fee at the elevator, honestly, but she shoved Gamzee on for free. 

“Get, brother,” she said.  “Messiahs bless, all that shit.”

Gamzee grabbed a couple movies from an abandoned entertainment stand, at one point, when the water was up to his knees and getting even higher on Aradia.  That was just a little bit before they found a good vent to slither into, and he told himself he didn’t feel guilty.

It was getting harder and harder for Gamzee to crawl through vents – even gaping Alternian vents on a ship where he probably wasn’t the tallest motherfucker around.  That should’ve been comforting, given how many times he’d dreamt about being all bent up like a crumpled doll, slouched in a vent and knowing he’d sleep there until whatever wanted to puppet him wouldn’t let him, anymore.  Feeling faint and woozy and flickering in and out, sometimes himself and sometimes not, sometimes all caught up in what felt like mental spiderweb.  It kind of sucked right about then, though, even if it _did_ move him further away from the dreams.  Aradia had to wait for him while he got around corners, sometimes, tapping her knuckles against the metal floor, crisp butler pants getting dusty at the knees.

They made it a good long way before they were crawling through water, but it didn’t take the flooding long to catch up with them.

“Messiahs fucking damn it,” Gamzee hissed, sloshing through the vents just that little bit faster, a stitch in his side and one of his horns aching from where he’d slammed it into the metal ceiling.  It was always uncomfortable for Gamzee, getting angry.  A little like panic setting in, and a little like that panic would change him.  It was especially bad since he’d run with the actual Subjugglators for a while – there was something else he _could_ be, all the time, not very far away.  There was water up his wrists, and he was just relying on Aradia to know where they were, and he’d knocked some motherfucker out and stolen movies Karkat might not even get to watch.

He hadn’t even looked at the box covers, really.  What if the last thing he did in the universe was steal his moirail some shitty movies he wouldn’t even like?

Karkat had been looking at him with so much trust, as he left.  Karkat wasn’t scared of him, but scared about what the fuck could happen to him.  It felt like another world, spending time with the trolls on the city-ship. 

“Hey, hey,” Aradia said, “Stay close to me, actually.  I have an idea.”

Aradia’s ideas had involved a lot of different things during their time in space, and usually not shit Gamzee would’ve ever thought of.  Sometimes she decided it was her job to solve a long-forgotten murder and set the ghost possessing their new alien coffee maker to rest.  Sometimes she thought it would be smart to collect every book they could on different dimensions, because hey, they were heading to one!  Might be some handy pointers in there, and Aradia was nothing if not really curious.

Now, her plan was to shove all the water back with her telekinetic burgundyblood powers when the vents flooded.  One moment they were suspended in ocean water, burning down Gamzee’s throat like he was choking on his insides, hacking up the last of his sopor-poisoned stomach lining again, and the next, well…  Aradia had shoved her arms as wide as they would go, and the water was trembling against her invisible barrier. 

Gamzee choked, and sucked in a deep breath.  He bent his head so he could keep inside Aradia’s reach, and he promised her he’d describe this moment as hilariously motherfucking heroic the minute he saw Tavros again.  The strain in his voice was only a little bit elastic and murder-mode – mostly he was still coughing.  The DVDs for Karkat were sitting near the front of his flashing miracle modus inventory, he knew, ready to grab. 

Aradia bared her teeth in what was definitely supposed to be a smile.  She said, “I can feel the ocean throughout the whole ship,” and then.  “The seadwellers are still a while away, checking out what I think is the mediculler lab.  We have a little while.  Go fast, though.”

“Got it, sister.”

By the time Gamzee and Aradia made it back to Equius and the modified escape ship, all her carefully done butler’s bun had come undone and she’d almost dropped the weight of the ship-ocean down on them a few times.  Gamzee kicked the vent open for them, again, and he tried to hold on to that image…  A huge clown shoe slamming open a fucking vent, escaping out in a single bubble of impossible, burgundyblood air in the middle of a flooded city-ship…  To remember after he dreamt about that old, true-world self again.  Those dreams were so far from the truth he had to know in this broken universe, they were a cull-worthy blasphemy.

_Also_ by the time they made it back, Equius had composed an angry essay about the way seadwellers culturally treated punctuality, and how it connected to when he did or did not get to video chat with Nepeta.  Gamzee listened to him, nodding every now and then, saying, “Oh, yeah, brother,” for as long as he had to.  He could tell the guy sort of needed it.

Nobody looked very long at the imperial battle craft docked up next to the city-ship – Gamzee practically held his breath until they were a good way gone.


	3. Do you think those real-universe motherfuckers can see us, then?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again!! I'm so, so sorry this one took me a while... I really appreciate you sticking with the story, if you've read even this far into the notes, and I hope you enjoy the chapter!! Have a wonderful day. I hope this turned out okay... I had some trouble getting it to feel right. Sorry, as always, for any and all mistakes I made!!! Thank you. :')

The next major message Gamzee and the Red Team got from the rest of their friends came the night after they’d put on a makeshift Fiduspawn talent show. That was motherfucking lucky, really — some small miracle, like the Messiahs must’ve been in a fine kind of mood.  Tavros had been looking forward to that shit.  At least they got to finish it up before leaving their dimension behind for a while, like they were sweeping all the blood-smeary confetti and bone shards up off a circus tent floor before snuffing the lights out and crawling into some slime to sleep.  Good and done, for now.

Gamzee hoped they’d be back among their real stars sometime, anyway.  Hoped so much it felt almost as raw as faith.  He prayed, mixing those aching wants in with his favorite hymn-raps when no one was around and listening except maybe Karkat, who had more right to know how he felt than anybody.  Karkat, who was determined to worry about him no matter what, Gamzee felt sure of that now.  How fucking crazy was that?  And after he dreamt so much about getting left behind.  After he dreamt so much about being hollow, a stranger in his own skin, with his chest a mess of bubbling bullet holes.  Karkat clenched his jaw together and dragged Gamzee down next to him, sometimes, said, “ _Talk_ , asshole,” even if Gamzee thought he’d been putting on a happy clown face all the fucking time.  Karkat hummed his hymn-raps, too, every now and then, although maybe he didn’t notice it.

The brother’d had long enough to learn ‘em anyway, but Gamzee still laughed all bemused to himself thinking on how he’d even want to.  He never would’ve guessed that, way back when Karkat pretty much only screamed at him in blocks of grey text, or even when his moirail had led him away from his hive that first time.  Like his whole waiting, empty beach could finally let out a breath it had been holding. Karkat still screamed, of course, but his voice could be rough and pitying and quiet more often than Gamzee would’ve guessed.  

Tavros had fancied the ship’s common areas up a little the night they did the talent show, and awkwardly hinted that everyone should cook something different.  The way Gamzee looked at it, Tav was probably just celebrating what he’d had around to like back on Alternia – games and funny animal things to commune with, the friends that _didn’t_  try to walk him off cliffs…  And of course that idea he’d had of wanting to become someone slick and genuinely confident.  (Tavros had always been “slick,” of course, completely and as true as the laughing gospels, but Gamzee’d never really been able to get him believing in it.  As if he’d ever forget the first time Tavros up and stole his motherfucking emoticon nose during a regular old conversation!  The guy was slick as fuck, slick as a jestprophet’s painted mask.)

Anyway, the idea had made a whole ton of sense to Gamzee.  He’d baked up the tastiest fucking thing he could think of with what they had out there in the middle of nowhere –  _and_  done his Messiahs-honest best to calm Equius back down when Terezi and Aradia’s mystery cake left the whole ship smelling like burned worms, too. (That motherfucking thing had been shockingly delicious in the end, so the joke was on Equius, brother.  The smell did last, though, like it had soaked into the walls.) 

As Gamzee understood it, motherfuckers were normally supposed to get Fiduspawn to duel with each other, often into slimy, heartbreaking messes so’s you’d have to keep buying more.  Not Tavros, though.  He’d never been down for Fiduspawn games like that.  Gamzee’s breath kept catching in his throat, watching Tavros herd those squealing, oozy little monsters across the ship floor.  His face just got so motherfucking peaceful and sure of his own self, then.  Tavros could be gentle with the littlest, most pathetic things.  That wasn’t something trolls built up on Alternia, sure, but sometimes Gamzee thought they fucking should.  Gentleness had to be harder than smashing a skull in with a juggling club got after traveling around with a divine murder circus for a long, long time. 

Tavros sort of recruited Gamzee as his personal assistant, too.  Like, “Hey, uh – can you arrange those boxes, there?  Into some kind of tower, I guess, for these little guys to smash through like Troll Godzilla?”

“You got it, bro.”

“And what do you think the final round should be?  I was thinking maybe that’s when we’d see if any of the Fiduspawn were ready to evolve…” 

 “I’ve got no fucking clue, to be honest with you.”

And all that noise, you know?  It reminded Gamzee a little of learning the rules to Eridan’s strategy game way back when, back on the ship Equius had lent them to go see the Juggling Eclipse.  This was a different sort of game, of course, with Tavros, and he was a different sort of teacher.  Tav’s voice was breathy and warm, like a crackling campfire on a night so cold everybody was gonna lean in close to the heat.  Stretching their hands out and squinting into the flames, all that, so the fire would end up branded on the darkness when they closed their eyes. 

Tavros lit up talking about different kinds of things than Eridan liked, just naturally.  Definitely didn’t rattle off the names of famous seadweller generals, remembering back to conquests of his own that had dyed the ocean in painful rainbows.  But it was the same sort of thing, Gamzee thought.  Setting up the pieces, playing a game together. Even when Karkat kept pointing out that they were not only intergalactic rebels, now, but they were  _also_  significantly too old for wiggler games…  Nah, didn’t make Fiduspawn any less fun. 

Terezi’s tiny smoke-coughing dragon thing with a gazillion millipede legs won the championship in the end, but Tavros found some reason to praise everybody.  Karkat snickered into his hand, watching Gamzee smiling over all that shit.

“Your flush crush is showing, again,” Karkat snorted.  In one of his too-loud whispers, though, so at least Tavros didn’t hear.  “You’ve got some Fiduspawn gunk in your hair, too – how’d that even happen?”

“Hey thanks, brother,” Gamzee said, swatting at the mess in his curls.  His claws came away dripping and sticky, like he was still stretching sopor slime out between them every motherfucking day.  Giving himself over to that hum and blur and forgetting.  A pitiable almost-smile twitched up Karkat’s lip, as he hid behind something he was writing.  Hid, and pretended like he  _hadn’t_  helped Gamzee get his Fiduspawn all hatched and growing right near the beginning of their trip.  Read the instructions aloud, you know, as Gamzee muttered rambly nonsense-prayers, hoping the splattering sound he’d heard wasn’t the sad little Fiduspawn egg getting crunched between his claws.

The Red Team had taken a few shortcuts into strangers’ space by the time the Blue Team’s message came through.  The stars seemed so far apart, out there, and the only Alternian signals they got were all crackly and difficult to pin down.  Gamzee had slept in later than usual after being awake so long into the daytime chilling with Tavros and taking down the Fiduspawn game shit — he dragged himself smeary-eyed and half-propped against the wall out to the helm only to find everyone gathered around a screen.  The light from whatever it was they were watching played strangely across Karkat’s face, making the bruised hollows under his eyes look deeper.  It was electric and cold across his bared fangs. 

Gamzee watched that light shift, admiring the soft curve of his moirail’s cheek.  There were acne scars, there, and a sort of roughness around the edges of his lips that came from scowling a lot.  Karkat’s mouth was hanging open in something that might have been awe, just then.  Might have been “horror,” too.  Hard to say.

As Gamzee watched, his friends all reacted to news he couldn’t quite hear.  Tavros folded his hand up over his mouth, eyes wide and daring; Aradia laughed, showing off the dimples in her cheeks.  She brushed her fingers along the screen like she was imagining it into somebody’s skin.  Then she swore and ducked her head – probably because she’d forgotten it was a touchscreen and messed up the display thing – but Equius “tsk”-ed and set it back right.

Terezi must have smelled lingering paint and blood like sweet artificial grape flavoring, because she glanced up and gestured for Gamzee to join them.  She was still wearing her dragon millipede Fiduspawn’s papery prize ribbon, just then – it had migrated across her clothes, up onto her forehead and was now balanced all lopsided and playful in her hair. 

Gamzee wandered over then, of course.  What else could he do?  That was Sollux on the screen, as Aradia reached out like she could touch him.  Like their fingers could brush, lowblood-warm and rough.  Eridan was monologuing about Feferi’s training regimen, and how completely she was changing.  A primal terror, an otherworldly lusus teacher tangling her tentacles up beneath the world, vital as a secret breathing heart – that’ll do it, you know?  He said sometimes it seemed like Feferi was moving beyond them all and becoming someone stranger.  Eridan would look into her eyes and see a witch or something too much like one staring back out at him, and  _he_  didn’t even believe in magic.  A science-witch of the deep sea, then, trying to channel a life, a power, she had never lived.  Coming closer and closer to herself.

Her eyes were flitting bioluminescent fish, in those times, ancient and restless and colder than Feferi usually let those melty, bleeding-heart eyes of hers get.  There was something like Her Imperious Condescension (and yet nothing like her at all, of course,  _of course_ , though it probably couldn’t have been avoided) in the way Feferi tossed her head, now, hair all tangled fairytale vines.  Twitching horrorterror tentacles and a kind of power you could taste in the air even if you  _weren’t_  Terezi.  Feferi could look so sure when she made up her mind, as if deciding the fate of galaxies.  And, you know…  If all went well, that was what she was gonna do, in a way.  She’d beaten most everything Nepeta threw at her in a few different combat styles, now, and her trident might have culled a poor motherfucker faster than Ahab’s Crosshairs.   

Gamzee murmured that he and the Red Team had a lot of catching up to do if Feferi was already so far along, and Eridan said that was for fuckin shore.  Equius scooted over so Gamzee could have a little more space by the screen, nodding all formal-like.  Impossibly far away, Eridan rubbed Sollux’s shoulder, his too many rings glinting in the blue-red electronic glare.  He shook Sollux back and forth a little, too, as if to make up for all that tenderness. 

Sollux gagged, muttered, “Again, Ampora?” but he didn’t pull away.  He must have been aching, hunched over his screens all the time, charting their path.  Following Her Imperious Condescension through her conquered stars.  Both their voices shivered in and out, every now and then.  Static-y, so clearly artificial and far away.  It didn’t feel like too long ago that Gamzee had been sharing a ship with those two, listening to them bicker and hate-make out a little too loudly, slammed against the wall of everybody’s shared respite block.  Off to see the Juggling Eclipse.  Now, they were almost in different  _universes_.  No more evenings with Sollux “accidentally” spilling troll coffee down Eridan’s back so he yelped and flapped his cape around…  No more trying to salvage Sollux’s landdweller electronics after Eridan “forgot” they weren’t supposed to go in the water with him.

That was actually why Sollux and Eridan had been trying so hard to contact them, though: all Sollux’s cryptic number-walls, all his sizzling, squirming wires, all his programs Gamzee didn’t really want to understand had made it clear that the Red Team was almost to their goal.  They were going to fall out of the world very, very soon.  He asked Terezi if she’d known, and she said, “It was in the clouds, so – figured it was possible,” whatever  _that_  meant.  Gamzee didn’t ask, but neither did anybody else.

Eridan and Sollux talked about how everyone was doing, back on the world that used to be (that  _should have been_ )home.  How Nepeta and Equius’s lusus, Aurthour, had put out a surprise fire in the Zahhak laboratory after a few early-model combat robots beat each other into sparks and slivers of charred, peeling metal.  How Kanaya and Vriska’d had to keep concocting wilder and wilder explanations for Terezi’s absence to all their old FLARP-ing companions until – well, dang! – it looked like she’d just run off to go be Scourge Siblings with some stuck-up seadweller and broke Vriska’s heart.   

Stuff like that.

They also talked about the planet where the Red Team was going, and Gamzee tried as hard as he could to remember it from one of his awful, smothering dreams.  The details were muddy for him, but he knew this much: Gamzee and his friends had given this planet life, and even now that it shouldn’t have been possible the place spun on just like the Juggling Eclipse did every now and again.  Full of hurt and possibility; full of a rhythm and divine purpose they could only vaguely understand.  Gamzee couldn’t imagine what sort of miracle place that could be – it shifted in his thoughts, like a fear getting all twisted up by chucklevoodoos until who the fuck even knew where it ended anymore.  He knew this world wasn’t supposed to exist, because they hadn’t “played the game” in this life.  He knew that was why they were broken, doomed from the beginning to be a useless offshoot of a timeline.  But what sort of world were they heading to?

Gamzee’s lusus was in their sky, Aradia had assured him.  The aliens on their created world had traced him out of their stars.  “Makara,” brother.  “Capricorn.”  What kind of ridiculous motherfucking gift was that?  Sometimes Gamzee wondered what that old goat was doing.  Whether he’d noticed his hopeless troll charge was gone…  Whether he’d given him up for dead by now.  Whether he was still twining himself through glinting, woozy shipwrecks, some motherfucking prey animal’s blood drifting from his mouth like streamers.  It was impossible to fucking know.

Towards the end of their last call before the edge of the universe, Sollux said, “AA, I just think you should know I miss you more than I could ever hate Eridan.” 

Aradia nodded sagely and said she’d always known as much; Eridan shoved his kismesis away from the camera and declared, “Technical difficulties.  No-fin to worry about,” in one of his loftiest aristocratic voices. 

Sollux snickered, a sloppy sound, nice and honest and flecking spit through his mishmash of jagged fangs – and then the screen cut out. 

They were getting close, and their friends were getting so, so far away.  Gamzee met Karkat’s eyes and saw an angry pit of fear there.  Bright red and obscene, yes, but easier to read than Gamzee knew his own eyes were. 

“What d’you wanna do now, man?” Gamzee asked him, voice soft and tumbling, still all gravely from sleep.

“ _Get there_ , I guess,” Karkat said.  “Get this fucking thing going.  It’s too late to go back and die easily, though we must’ve been some real shit-for-brains idiots to ever agree to any of this in the first place.”

“Must’ve been,” Gamzee said.  Their ship seemed to creak and sway around him, all whirring movement and technology fixed together by a troll whose battle robots had recently set themselves on fire.  They were so small compared to one universe, nevermind two.  Equius was trying again and again to re-initiate that call with Eridan and Sollux; he was murmuring that he would be  _very fudging cross_  if he didn’t at least get to see Nepeta before they left Alternia so far behind. 

Gamzee shook his head, and then, “I’ll make us something to eat, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Karkat agreed, twitching like it was itchy under his skin.  Everybody jumped at shadows, that night, and watched the emptiness all suspiciously through their windows.  The edge of reality didn’t come for them yet, though.  

It happened in the middle of the next day, when most everyone except Terezi was asleep.  Felt sort of right, that it would go down when nobody fucking expected it…  After all that waiting and pacing, after Karkat had locked himself in his and Gamzee’s respite block for so damn long without any sound sneaking out at all.  Dwelling.  Terezi was working all the controls around then, reading stars and darkness in that same sightless way she breathed in emotion and could lick colors right off a screen.  Gamzee pictured her with her feet up on Sollux’s carefully installed control panels, pointy red glasses reflecting back the void.  They finally fell between realities the way Gamzee dropped flaky troll chips between seat cushions, shuffled into a crack in space-time like it was no big thing. 

Terezi said the air tasted different, though, right away – wanting, somehow.  Yeah, she knew everything was wrong the minute she felt that new world pressing against her skin.  She stood a moment in front of their ship’s windows, taking rattling breath after breath.  And then she turned crisply on her heel, trying to keep her face sure and smiling as her ancestor Redglare’s.  Or, Gamzee thought that’s what she must’ve fucking done – she was wearing that cutthroat Legislacerator smile when she came for him, after all.  She went to wake everyone up, slamming open doors and kicking recuperacoons so the sopor sloshed.  Sparking in a motherfucker’s brain.

Karkat took a little while longer than Gamzee to get out to the windows, checking in on wherever the fuck they were.  Wanted to smear all that day’s sopor slime off his skin, see?  Gamzee trailed that shit down the hallway, though, and didn’t even think about it until it was too fucking late.  Have to spend a while mopping it up, or Equius would give him an “I’m Disappointed Again, Highblood” sort of speech.  And Equius didn’t deserve that hmph-ing sourness, not now. Gamzee didn’t think the guy’s ever managed to get ahold of his Nepeta. Gonna miss that kitty, gonna worry about her all the goddamn time. 

Gamzee saw it, though, before they passed through.  He saw the truest world. 

It was full of rattling asteroids, brushing up close to something Feferi had told them about called the Furthest Ring.  There was a green sun out there, swollen and seething, keeping everything together.  Terezi whispered that she could taste it: bigger than a universe, acidic and strange.  Horrorterrors all too like Feferi’s lusus stretched out just beyond sight; Terezi said she could feel their staring the same way she tasted the sour lime brightness of that miraculous new sun.  The abyss watched them, tentacles twined, and planets Gamzee couldn’t even begin to understand circled in those unreal spaces.  He felt like maybe one of them was  _his_ , somehow, although that couldn’t have been right.

He stared at the asteroids, spinning like tops in all that velvety emptiness.  He saw, very small and far away, the blurry shapes that were what he and all his friends were actually supposed to be.

They were gathered along the back of one of those asteroids, skittering like ants on a kicked-over rock.  Gamzee thought he could make Karkat out, swatting weapons out of their friends’ hands.  He thought he saw himself, soggy with other motherfuckers’ blood and swaying like a circus tent in the wind.  He said, “There we are, huh, sis?”

And Terezi said, “Don’t look, if it messes with your thinkpan,” and she sounded unusually gentle for a second.  Like she knew something she didn’t think Gamzee would ever want to know.  Something to do with his face split messily in two and howling, maybe; something to do with how left-behind he felt when he woke up suddenly and hadn’t remembered he was scrunched up next to Karkat in their sopor yet.  It was like Terezi felt bad for him, no matter how many other times she’d thought up little ways to fuck with him along their trip so far.  Scribbling on his posters.  Replacing his recuperacoon slime with some kind of squishy alien dessert.

Gamzee watched, anyway, for just a little while.  He breathed in what it might have felt like, being a part of the divine and unforgiven truth.  He squinted down at that far off other self of his and asked Terezi, “Is that Nepeta’s blood, on my motherfucking arms?”

Terezi said, “Yes.”

Gamzee swallowed, hard, and pried his eyes away; Karkat stomped over to the window still scrubbing sopor slime out of his hair.  Their ship barreled on through the real world, suddenly more solid than it had ever deserved to be.  A white dog chased a black dog through the space between worlds for some reason Gamzee didn’t even know how to guess at – the game played itself out in that painfully real universe, like an intricate design set up in dominoes.  Ready to tip and put reality back into place.  Show the whole crazy picture that had been in the works for who the fuck even knew how many sweeps. 

It wasn’t Gamzee’s story, but it might have been.  He had to stay focused on his own fucking truth. So far as he and his friends were concerned, their offshoot timeline had to be enough, or they'd never be able to be what it needed, right? 

They didn’t stay in the real world long.               


	4. Wait, how can you smell stuff through actual space?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey!!! :D Thanks for sticking with the story -- I really really hope you have fun with chapter 4, if you read~ I'm gonna try to update on Sundays, now. :) Sorry, as always, for any mistakes I made... And I hope you have an amazing day/week!

Maybe it was because Sollux hadn’t managed to map out any shortcuts through that universe they’d all up and magically created somehow, but Gamzee sort of felt like they took forever hurtling through it to get where they needed to go.  Terezi said she would know the planet they needed when she smelled it, or maybe tasted it if she decided to lick the monitor, which Karkat declared was “Only the least possible amount of helpful” for the time-being.  Terezi smiled jauntily and said, “Aw, _thank_ you!” to that.  Everybody knew she’d rather be marginally helpful than rattling around like everybody else was, fuming halfheartedly about the real world with its solemn meteors, its swollen green sun and its secrets.  Terezi was the one with the clearest idea where they were going, now.  A ringmaster of a kind, the only motherfucker who was really knowing what act came next. 

Terezi talked like maybe she liked shit that way, but Gamzee thought he could tell she was afraid a little, too.  It was in the way she laughed, trying to trick Equius into believing she’d really steer them into some alien sun.  It prickled all through Gamzee’s thinkpan when he looked at her too long, just a little like what people said chucklevoodoos felt like in books Karkat read when trying to get his moirail off the slime.  Chucklevoodoos to make trolls scared; chucklevoodoos to warp and break and contain all those motherfuckers back on Alternia.  Maybe Gamzee knew fear the way his lusus knew blood in the water.  Something to hunt, and now it was close enough to chase.  Part of his divine and hilarious birthright, that twisted carnival Alternia had made out of his gospels.  Really, it just got Gamzee to be a little softer with Terezi while they were drifting, and you know she thought he was already a little soft, anyway.

Gamzee didn’t actually mind drifting a whole ton, either.  He’d been drifting most of his motherfucking life, and he was better at waiting than he was even at faith, or fancy fucking juggling tricks like what he’d practiced watching videos of the mirthful gatherings he couldn’t pry his bones up from the grey beach to attend.  Honestly, it was probably a blessing to go slow for a while, given how they’d just gotten all up close and personal with the real world they’d been hatched for but couldn’t belong to.  Got things going a little more like “normal,” so long as nobody talked about their dreams.

Gamzee played a sounding board for Tavros and Aradia’s enthusiasm, finally getting their fancy little ghost tablet stuck back together and showing signs of a weird and binding magic.  (Meaning he gaped and went “Oh shit, brother!” at mostly the right times, and tried to laugh it off when Aradia demonstrated the thing by temporarily sticking his hands together while he’d been clapping all loopy and clownish for them.) 

He also got around to asking Terezi what she’d meant when she said she knew the gap in realities was maybe coming up soon ‘cause of something to do with clouds – no clouds in space, not like trolls knew them on old Alternia.  She just squinted at him from behind her jagged red glasses and declared that he’d understand when he finally got his lazy ass out of bed…  Whatever that meant.  Messiahs – whatever the fuck a “bed” was!  Gamzee just laughed and said, “Aw, yeah, sister.”  See?  He was being softer than usual, and Terezi swatted him on the arm for it like, “You’re not supposed to let me talk to you like that, Makara!  Remember?”

But more than anything, Gamzee ended up spending a lot of waiting times hanging out with Karkat and trying to get him to talk.  Wasn’t usually that hard.  They’d watch movies, sure, and take care of Gamzee’s post-championship Fiduspawn.  Karkat watched Gamzee smearing on his nightly face paint, his own believer’s face, smooth and eternally smiling as he’d desperately wanted his own motherfucking self to be back when he’d designed it.  Except Karkat’s eyes seemed dull and far away, you know, brother?  Punchline-red and brighter than bright, but like he was tangling so many words in his head that his thinkpan felt like intestines some Subjugglator had twisted up and couldn’t ever get free without them splattering everywhere.  Turning to soggy mush in their claws. 

It reminded Gamzee a little too much of that time back before the Juggling Eclipse, when Karkat hadn’t admitted his motherfucking blood to any motherfucker, not even a moirail who they both knew would’ve taken on an imperial drone with a set of juggling clubs if it meant Karkat might go free.  Gamzee knew he would’ve gotten himself culled trying to pull off that kind of righteous trick, but he’d also thought about what it would be like to try.  Going for the feelings he knew to be true in some deep, secret core of himself, the same place where he kept all his believing in the Mirthful Messiahs.  Maybe any motherfucker pale for a mutantblood would feel the same way.  But Karkat hadn’t said anything then, and he didn’t say anything now, though they both knew something was up.  Something had been up since coming back from that real world, the timeline where their other selves looked to be already playing some motherfucking cosmic game who the fuck could ever completely know. 

Maybe it was the way he’d seen Gamzee all soaked in their friends’ blood, trailing it behind him like an actual motherfucking Subjugglator.  Making the blood-paint part of their show.  That could’ve changed things, some.  Maybe it was how Karkat had felt staring up into a void where horrorterrors churned and spat, like a ton of Feferi’s stupidly dangerous lusus just watching all the motherfucking time.  Maybe it was something Gamzee couldn’t even guess, and wouldn’t ever be able to shoosh away until Karkat let him in a little.  But he was a crab just tucked away in his shell, about then.  Staring out while Gamzee chatted on and on, maybe swiping a claw every now and then to grab some snacks.

Karkat wasn’t pissed off at him, so far as he could tell.  He still read Gamzee some gentle palemance scenes from a script he was working on, and squeezed his hand tight even while he told him to shut the fuck up and listen.  Karkat sometimes came to sit with Gamzee when he was supposed to be guarding the helm, too, sitting sleepily slouched in a chair and theorizing about all the strangely silent worlds they were passing.  This universe they’d made seemed pretty stunted and empty, so far, without a lot of radio signals or communication shit at all.  Karkat helped Gamzee name the stars their other selves had made, until he suddenly didn’t.  Until he slipped back into his shell and sat in an unsteady quiet before going back to their respite block for some sleep.  So no – maybe not mad.  Something quiet and seeping, painful like the secret of his blood.  Gamzee’d figure it out, he told himself.  He would wait and take whatever quiet time it took to know what his moirail needed from him.  And then, well.  Shit.  He’d try his Messiahs-honest best to provide, wouldn’t he?

 It wasn’t hard to know why Equius was most upset, which was probably why Gamzee ended up sparring with him the night he got his first hate-kiss…  Whether he was ready for that shit or not, brother.  See, it was all about Nepeta.  Of course Equius had wanted to see that kitty girl again before they left their universe; of course he was moping by the shipping chart she’d helped him map out on the wall.  He was imagining her training a more and more regally monstrous Feferi for battle.  He was imagining the heiress losing control and gutting her with a trident, maybe, so she’d gasp, “Nice job, heh,” before crumpling in a pool of slick and bubbling olive until Feferi’s eyes cleared of cosmic godhood and she screamed.  Like Nepeta was somebody in an action movie, you know?  Which was basically what she already was, sometimes, with those blood-clotted metal claws she slipped over her hands, and how chipper she could sound dragging an enormous slaughtered monster corpse behind her and planning out a tea party.  Equius was motherfucking furious with Sollux and Eridan for not going to get her sooner, even though they couldn’t have rightly known the connection would die so quick.

Gamzee couldn’t blame him, of course.  Maybe Equius was being a little sullen and sharp with everybody, and maybe he had accidentally crushed one of the helm computers so it was just a sparking, battered mess until he managed to scrounge up the parts to fix it, but he was also so alone out there.  Nobody to braid his sweaty hair away from his face as tenderly as Nepeta had, or to mix troll cocoa powder into his milk when the days felt long and his bones ached from all those straining, crushing muscles of his.  Nobody to remind him when he needed to take a break working on projects, either.  Except Gamzee.  And _Nepeta_ he would’ve listened to without all the groveling and, “Oh certainly, my Highblood”-ing.  Equius would’ve listened to Nepeta without being so motherfucking infuriating, like a motherfucker out screaming false blasphemies just so’s the church would find him out and teach him laughing pain.

The thing was, though, Equius wasn’t sleeping.  When he was supposed to be floating suspended in some merciful, pan-rot slime, he was pacing the ship.  Fiddling with whatever he could – building Messiahs-knew what all in his respite block.  Spreading his cogs and wires and shit out into the hallways so a brother had to step over it really careful on the way by.  He updated his and Nepeta’s shipping chart all cryptically, too, and stared out at all the star systems they passed.  He probably grilled Terezi more than even Karkat did, demanding to know where the motherfucking world they were going to was at.  You know.  Sometimes she pointed out the window like, “Oh hey!  There it is now!” and waited for his scowl to get so dark and damp it looked like he was thinking about culling a motherfucker.  Then, _then_ , she laughed.            

But Equius needed sleep as much as any motherfucker, and Gamzee was getting kind of antsy about the low, dangerous way his voice went sometimes.  So that day, while Equius was sitting surrounded in a mess of cogs and blueprints and messily torn slabs of metal, he was like, “Hey, bro, don’t you need a little motherfucking shut-eye?” and Equius was all, “If you say so, Highblood.”

But then he sat very, very still.  Staring ahead of him, surrounded by his science-y junk.  Like he couldn’t even work up the will to stand.  Gamzee suggested they go watch a movie or something, just the two of them, which usually Equius would’ve leapt for all messily.  He would’ve taken the chance to critique whatever amazing shit happened on the screen, watching Gamzee out of the corner of his eye to see what might push him into snapping.  Instead, though, he stared up from behind his cracked, broken-sky glasses and asked if they could spar, instead.  Like he did with Nepeta.  He asked it all plain and vulnerable, as if he was talking to somebody else.

So of course Gamzee said they could.  Well, actually he said, “I dunno if I’ll be any good fighting with a pair of motherfucking claw-hands, but I’ll do my best.  Okay?”

And maybe it was his imagination, but Gamzee thought Equius laughed, a little.  A low, greasy chuckle, like a shifting of gears in the dark.   

He’d sparred with Equius before.  Practicing to be different selves – horrible, blasphemous lying makeup slathered on to play like some other clown.  For the greater good; for the greater truth.  How many sacrifices would Gamzee be willing to make for that greater truth?  It was a hilarious thought, if kinda sad to dwell on too long.  He’d sparred with Equius then, and with a dozen different weapons, too.  Sometimes a bow Equius would croon over, dazzled by how casually his highblood held the thing, as if he didn’t even know he could be elegant.  Sometimes with a little velvet bag of chaotically weaponized rubber balls, which Equius had to be really fucking fast to dodge.  Or else he’d get a perfectly circular hole smoking right through his guts, or something. 

But now, Gamzee sparred with his own weapons, in his own motherfucking paint.  Those old juggling clubs.  That soft, goofy smile.  He pulled back just before striking, sometimes, and Equius came at him with a force he wasn’t expecting.  Equius flipped him over on his back, wheezing, and Equius held him pressed tight against his chest so he could feel the sweat dripping through his shirt.  Gamzee was taller, of course, and Equius couldn’t always get his arms all the way around him, but – but he pushed him, anyway.  Sparred like he would’ve sparred with Nepeta, maybe.  Sparred like he meant it.  Or, y’know, sparred just enough to get Gamzee fighting back, snarling curses in the Messiahs’ harshwhimsical names.

And he did, brother, after a time.  Gamzee almost let himself get motherfucking swept up in his rage-self, with that seesawing elastic voice, that blackout hurt.  Almost.  He was teetering on the edge, like wading a little ways out into the ocean to see if the smudge on the horizon could really be his lusus drifting in from far away.  Getting his toes wet, through his big floppy clown shoes.

And that was when Equius kissed him.  When his mouth was all bared, giggling fangs and his eyes were sharper than usual through all his foggy sopor-rot.  That was when Equius pinned his clubs in the air, and Gamzee found himself straining against his incredible strength, straining to make that swing.  He could taste the competition in the back of his mouth, feel his heart hammering on like jaunty carnival music.  He caught his breath when he felt how cold and slick Equius’s kiss was.  Nothing like Karkat’s, all warm and knowing and exactly when he needed it.  Nothing like he’d imagined Tavros’s, either, in all the sweeps he’d known him.    

Equius tasted metallic, and he held on long enough that Gamzee squirmed.  But then, catching a stuttering breath, he let go right away.  As if Gamzee’s discomfort had burned him.  Gamzee blinked his rage away; he saw how Equius was chewing his lip with cracked and battered fangs, breath heaving, hardly able to look him in the eye. 

He said, “That was _some_ sparring, man,” and Equius – looking like he really wanted something else but would take what he could motherfucking get – said, “Exceptionally.  Yes.”

And then Gamzee thought about how Karkat had asked what he’d do if Equius ever confessed hate for him.  How he’d joked about the guy having a better shot asking out one of his alter egos instead; how he’d still worried over Equius all the way until that very day.  How maybe Equius had kissed him because he wanted Nepeta, wanted somebody near him in all that sprawling empty.  Wanted to feel seen by someone he’d been taught had grand, carbonated blood, even if it was Gamzee.  Or maybe, _maybe_ he’d been wanting that particular kiss for a long time, and part of the sick feeling in Gamzee’s stomach was that he thought maybe he’d never be able to tell for sure. He'd been resigned to that, but now --

But maybe now he _had_ to have some kind of better idea?  Gamzee'd never been kissed like that before. Not by anyone but Karkat, and those were pale kisses, a supportive diamond that he had to believe wouldn't keep the kind of secrets that mattered, anymore.  

Gamzee said he had to get going, but he said it in a rough, smoky voice he didn't recognize. When Equius asked if they could try honest sparring again, sometime, he smiled and said he figured they might get another shot at it.  Let a brother make up his own mind about what that meant – about sparring, about what came after.  Honestly, Gamzee wasn’t too sure in his own self, yet.  Sometimes it was a fine act, for a clown to be cryptic until the pieces came together.  Gamzee had to get his own acrobat-heart to calm the fuck down, first.  Maybe chill with Karkat and talk through whatever was in his pan.  He’d listen, Gamzee knew it, whatever the fuck was going on that his moirail hadn’t shared yet.  Karkat would nod along, and maybe help him scrawl out some sort of feelings chart, and when they were done he’d finally understand shit.  Hopefully.

They drifted on.  Closer and closer, now.  Almost motherfucking there.

Earth wouldn’t look a thing like Gamzee had expected it to, when it finally turned up outside their ship windows. 


	5. What would it’ve been like, waiting on one of these Earth beaches?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Happy Sunday, and welcome to chapter 5/Valentine’s Day week. :P I hope you enjoy it, if you read~~ Sorry for any and all mistakes!!! 
> 
> (Also: When I first started working on this, I asked my friend CytosineSkald/Meredith for a TV show the trolls could pick up on their way to earth. For fun, haha. One of the shows she suggested was Parks and Recreation… So I make a few jokes about that show, here. : ) <3 Thank youuuu, Meredith~~)
> 
> I’ll be back next week with chapter 6~!

Yeah, so “Earth” was kinda a weird place, the whole Red Team could tell just from the outside.  Creeping up on it from the depths of that silent space, poised and ready to strike like the Grand Highblood’s own weaponized jack-in-the-box.  The first frequencies coming in from Earth that Terezi had been able to untangle with their Alternian tech had been a thing about the weather – mostly cloudy, chance of strong winds, brother – and then a TV show about a bunch of humans trying to keep something called a “Parks Department” going.  Planting lots of trees; throwing parties where not even a single motherfucker died. 

Everybody agreed on two things about that show.  One, Karkat and the grumpy mustache human who loved cluckbeast ova and telling everybody to fuck off were almost hatched from the same egg sometimes. Not all the time -- not by a long fucking shot -- but some of the time... Damn. Terezi had teasing fodder for sweeps.

Second, it was sort of like the Alternian program, _Wherein a Headstrong and Absurdly Eager Legislacerator Takes on the System and Rises through the Ranks Until She Can Stand Cackling at His Honorable Tyranny’s Feet, Beginning First with her Exploits in the Field of Basic Subgrub Entertainment Lawkeeping and Moving into Explorations of all our Heroine’s Quadrants and Culls…_   Etc.  You know the one.  Except, human quadrants weren’t too clearly defined…  And how could so much TV time pass without anyone getting mangled, probably by a divine and mirthful clown?  Weren’t even any imperial mandates mixed in with the motherfucking weather report.

But every weird thing the Red Team learned watching Earth TV – (and there _were_ other shows coming along later, shit like reality shows where humans built stuff and screamed at each other and hilarious crime dramas Terezi actually started recording) – absolutely paled in comparison to the earth itself when they reached it.  For one thing, the Earth was mostly water.  Thinking on the sort of primal, ancient gods that could coil underneath so much motherfucking ocean boggled Gamzee’s mind.  His lusus would’ve had so many places to hide himself away, the old goat hunting happily through a dark bigger than Gamzee could ever swim, even _without_ murderous seadwellers waiting to harpoon him. 

And also, well.  There were the Alternian satellites flying around, cloaked and squirming between all the human ones.  Some were dead, hollow things, knocking Earth stuff out of the sky, but others were still blinking their little motherfucking robotic eyes.  Whispering in chittering, insectoid satellite voices.  They were broadcasting somewhere, maybe?  They were the motherfucking Condesce’s.  Imprinted with her seal, or with those twin jester faces of the hired barkbeasts she’d gathered from Gamzee’s own Mirthful Church.  Twin jester faces laughing and screaming, released and frantic and uncannily like Gamzee’s own split-skull in his dreams.  Why _was_ that?  Gamzee didn’t think it’d do him any good to wonder long on that shit.  Not yet.

The Condesce had been out there to earth, even in their ruined, unreal timeline.  That much was as glaringly real as a satellite painted up like a circus tent, spinning in an eternal, whimsically lopsided orbit most Earth motherfuckers wouldn’t be able to know.  Only… Equius and Terezi couldn’t pick up any actual Alternian ship signals _anywhere_.  That was eerie as fuck, bro, like some kinda chucklevoodoo dream sizzling around a motherfucker’s mind and changing it forever.  Could be a ship lying in wait and watching them they just couldn’t see yet, you know?  Or could be Her Imperious Condescension had left some messed up shit behind on the planet’s surface and they’d run into it sooner or later.  So that was a thing most everybody was thinking about, as they eased into orbit.  As they plotted out their next motherfucking moves.         

Their whole ship seemed to let out a twitching sigh of relief, coming up on Earth, anyway.  Karkat was still a bundle of quiet, quiet nerves most of the time, and Gamzee could feel the knots in his shoulders even through those heavy sweaters.  Slinging an arm around him, snuffling clown-paint kisses into his hair.  Some of the relief might’ve come from Aradia and Tavros’s tablet magic wearing off, mind you – she’d tried using it on non-physical stuff, which had left all their words stuck together for a whole night, everything blurring into a formless haze like the whole world was spinning on sopor slime.  Shouldn’t have been possible, but what the fuck did _that_ mean, anyway?  Didn’t matter if shit was possible, so long as it was true.

But that shit was clearing, and the earth was waiting beneath them, and they had to get a move on.  Terezi had to feel out what she knew about Gl'bgolyb’s prophesy and hunt down the mind of one of those fancy heroes destined to topple the Condesce’s machine.  _That_ meant scrolling through hundreds of videos of Earth landmasses, apparently, cluttered with thousands of fucking star monkeys with Karkat’s own punchline blood.  That meant leaving lots of smeary teal tongue-stains across screens, and apparently going to check out the clouds Gamzee would’ve been able to know, too, if he could only “wake up.” 

Gamzee cooked for everybody, in the meantime, and he trained against Equius’s battle robots, and he sat all silently with Karkat’s head in his lap.  Running long, crooked claws through his hair, eyes half-closed and dreaming.  Dreaming the edges of something gold and lofty and bright enough to burn your eyes out.  The edges of it, man, but not the meat.  Like snapping off a troll’s horn when you were going for the motherfucking throat.

Gamzee started telling Karkat about Equius and that strange taste he’d had of maybe-hatemance a couple different times, but they didn’t get too far into it.  Karkat listened just like he’d thought he would – he propped himself up and studied Gamzee’s eyes and said things like, “Hold on, don’t tell me what you think he wanted, yet.  Tell me what you _felt_.”  But dangling right there, above the Earth and waiting, Gamzee kept getting himself all tongue-tied.  He said it all boiled down to shit he didn’t know, or couldn’t believe in yet.  Feelings he didn’t like chewing on.  (About being _enough_ for people, consistently – about being any motherfucker’s first pick.  About a lusus that hadn’t even wanted to stick around him as he grew into his blood.)

Once Gamzee went into saying it, there was shit that got stuck in his throat.  A firebreather all choking on smoke.  Karkat said they’d try again once they got going on the Earth part of their mission.  Once everybody’s nerves settled, and Gamzee had time to get his words together.  He knew what to say when it mattered, Karkat. 

 Some hurts were ground in deep as sopor rot, but they’d talk it through slow.  Gamzee believed in that, if he believed anything at all.   

 And there _was_ Earth to deal with, too.  There was the first hero.  Took a while for Terezi to find her, but when she did she announced it in a triumphant and clattering Legislacerator voice. 

She said, “She’s a hermit like you were, Equius.  Hermit-inventor person, so she should fit right in with you weirdos.”  And, “We’re sending Karkat.  _Just_ Karkat.  Don’t even make that face at me, Makara – you’d know I was right if you saw what I smelled.”

Karkat grinned viciously, then, like that was what he’d wanted to hear most in all this strange new galaxy.  Of course he’d been holding on to what Feferi had assured them way back when, that there were some things on this new ocean-drowned world that only he would be able to do for them. People only  _he_  would be able to reach.  After too long watching everybody else go off on little missions and shit, to steal some motherfucking ship parts, to check out spooky abandoned space stations still soaked in ghosts, all that noise... Yeah. Karkat was done being trapped inside and feeling like an understudy in the show.  He clapped his hands together all authoritative, now. He rattled off human costumes and mannerisms they’d learned from TV frequencies and all that, trying to narrow down what all his disguise should be. 

Gamzee would’ve been lying if he said Karkat seemed truly happy, though.  If he said it seemed like the drooping gloom their real world with all its unlived lives had left over him was completely lifted.  Nah.  It was like Karkat was looking out at them through thick, sickly sweet smoke at the start of some sorta magician act, looking a little more alive and part of the performance but not quite _there_ yet.  He flushed dark red after talking about his blood as a weapon here –  humans wouldn’t even think the smell of it was weird, maybe, and even if he got sliced open somehow he probably wouldn’t end up gasping in some lab, plugged into humanity’s mysterious clunky computers.  Maybe he got all embarrassed ‘cause he was talking about forbidden, blasphemous blood so casually, like he’d decided it didn’t have to be such a bad thing anymore. Or maybe it was ‘cause he realized he was describing himself getting all cut up to his own fucking moirail, and Gamzee’s face was twisting into something  _funny_.           

No, Gamzee wasn’t gonna be allowed down onto the island Karkat had to go to just then. The first hero would sense him, Terezi was sure. She would know the sugary-sharp fizz of his clown blood as a threat.  She knew the Empress’s way, at least a little, little bit. She knew there was something wrong in their universe, and she had a significant number of Earth weapons just lying around. 

“Not being real motherfucking encouraging, sis,” Gamzee told Terezi. 

She said she knew. 

“Not that I don’t believe he can do it,” Gamzee said, feeling a rubbery frown tugging down at his clown paint.  Disliking the snarl in his voice. “I just dunno – some Messiahs-damned clouds spout all this noise, so we gotta listen?  Sounds like some lying bullshit, no divine gospels to back that up.”  

Terezi said she’d known he’d feel all  _those_  ways, too, but shrugged like, “What can ya do?”  She offered to let him sit up by her, watching Karkat on a little monitor, twiddling their claws.  Seeing what he saw, but unable to grab hold of it from orbit. Shit would’ve been different if his brain was less sopor-melted, if he could spin chucklevoodoos like hymn-raps.  Like another one of his brothers and sisters in faith might’ve done. Couldn’t, though. 

Karkat almost forgot to say goodbye to Gamzee before he was sent down, which felt a little like having his shadow split off after all the time they’d spent together.  After all the cozy hollowness of space, of running on the same side. But then Karkat jolted, and tossed such sorry eyes over his shoulder that Gamzee just waved.  Called pale, soft words. Told Karkat he was believing in him, so his fangs could get flashed all wild and sure, again.  Smiling like he had a calling, ‘cause he absolutely fucking did.  So he could wear their faith around like face paint. 

Karkat gave him pale words back, and said he would come home soon.  Gamzee held on to that word, “Home,” just the way Karkat had probably known he would.

“We’ll pull you out, if we can,” Terezi told Karkat. “If it gets bad. But you have to fly the ship yourself. Try not to crash and die.”  She paused, calculating. Assessing his expression before she joked, “Equius said the ship was  _very_  expensive, after all!”  Karkat barked a laugh at that, and Terezi might’ve looked relieved to hear it.

The island Karkat had to fly off to was just a smudge of green in all that restless alien ocean.  Like somebody’d accidentally gotten paint on their skin and left a thumbprint or whatever behind where it wasn’t supposed to be.  Karkat screamed, entering Earth’s atmosphere, but it was more the way a motherfucker might howl on a less-murderous carnival ride than like he was freezing up within his own self.  Gamzee thought about the way Karkat had stared, hands shaking, when their ship had been overtaken by pissed-off seadwellers on the way to see the Juggling Eclipse. He thought about the way he’d turned on his dangerous inheritance, ushering Karkat away from anyplace where his blood might get spilled.  Snapping like a rubber band, and fighting alongside Eridan until he couldn’t (didn’t want to) remember a motherfucking thing. 

Time had passed, hadn’t it?  Karkat was restless and overeager, but he definitely didn’t crash that ship, yet.  Didn’t die, either, or sizzle up in the dull Earth sun.  Crazy shit, going out during the day, but apparently humans didn’t always take kindly to motherfuckers all coming to their hives at night. 

 The island was curled like a crescent moon, as Karkat got closer, with a volcano burbling along one side. Painful as a boil. There was a weathered worship circus all made out of stone and creeping vines, plus a sort of metal hive polished up to shine like a mirror.  Trees swayed, looking sleepy sort of, and strange half-built inventions seemed to sprout up between them out of the motherfucking earth. 

Jade Harley lived here.  Jade Harley, who Feferi called the Witch of Space.  She had to be first, Terezi said, and Karkat had to bring her to them.

Karkat waded through the wet, sticky grass on the edge of Jade Harley’s island, complaining as he went so it crackled through Terezi’s speakers.  About the plants sticking messily to his legs.  About the muted, seeping sunlight.  Gamzee was like, “Aw, sorry, bro,” but Terezi was like, “Careful!  Don’t leave the actual ship unlocked!  Damn it, Karkat, what if Dr. Harley gets in and flies off before we can reach her?  What if she disables the engine to fuck with us?” 

Karkat locked the ship.  He climbed past inventions that looked eerily, impossibly familiar, like a tossed away and half-formed artificial tree with festive juggling balls dangling from it.  Like a cracked window growing out of the earth, sparking with the palest blue light.  Every now and then, little scenes from far away – or maybe from some human movie the Red Team just hadn’t seen yet? – flickered across their glass.  Like something half-remembered, glimpsed for a second and then gone like wicked elixir poured down Eridan’s sink to make a point.  It was kinda sweet, seeing all that through Karkat’s eyes.  He was shorter than Gamzee’d been in a whole lot of sweeps, and each of his thudding steps shook the view a little. 

Gamzee could hear the ocean, even with their signal being as wonky as it had all to be.  Earth’s ocean, not his own, although it made him feel like he knew this Jade Harley a little better thinking she must’ve fallen asleep listening to it.  Muted through whatever humans slept suspended in instead of sopor, sure.  She’d smell that ocean too, all the motherfucking time, even through the oil and burned metal of her Equius-y workshop. 

They had known there wouldn’t be a whole ton of humans on Jade Harley’s island, which was one of the reasons why it was best to be going to see her first of everyone.  But after a while of Karkat peeking around giant mysterious mad scientist laser canons and getting stared at by a silent barkbeast lusus that wouldn’t respond when he called to it, he began kinda doubting Jade Harley herself was gonna be around.  Terezi said, “She is.  Let her find you.  And when she does, _stay calm_.”  

Gamzee agreed with Karkat’s opinion here, that this advice was pretty motherfucking terrifying as far as advice went.  The dog lusus crackled and disappeared in a sizzle of electricity, which he didn’t think normal Alternian barkbeast caretakers could usually do.  And after a while of hunting around, then – checking the unsteady temple while assuring everybody he was _definitely_ gonna fall to his death when the stone dropped out, scanning around for Alternian shields and that kinda shit – Karkat tried the door to Jade Harley’s hive. 

It was unlocked, and swung open almost as if he was expected there.

“Hey!  Hey, Jade Harley?” Karkat called, in the entryway.  Machines whirred, inside, and overlapping computer voices rambled on about Earth things Gamzee didn’t think much on yet.  Dust motes hung suspended in the air, spinning like Subjugglators up above the world.  Swinging between ropes of silk and meat.   

“ _Go on_ ,” Terezi said.  Maybe Gamzee was imagining the nervousness in her voice, but he definitely wasn’t imagining the sputter of fear in her head.  “But go slowly, and keep your hands up like in a human Legislacerator show, got it?”

Gamzee growled at that, honestly – sort of like the growls you saw from Subjugglators in imperial propaganda movies, just before some unfunny motherfucker was gonna learn the wicked truth all up and coming for them.  He didn’t like the steel walls, and he liked the dusty ones even less, as Karkat crept past piles of sagging books and old, faded human trophies… Including one that looked like an adult human that’d gotten himself stuffed and mounted, skin sagging and dusty through all its sour preservatives.  Gamzee thought he could imagine the smell, imagine it so well he almost tasted that shit.

Gamzee might’ve asked himself how dangerous humans could really be, considering their news programs without any murderous goings-on onscreen, and the way they didn’t seem to think a whole lot about drowning and conquering other worlds.  But he had seen Jade Harley’s weapons, and he knew she was one of those holy foretold pieces left over from a universe beyond themselves, destined to do great and mirthful work back on Alternia…   Jade Harley was a big player, wasn’t she?  And Karkat hadn’t killed in sweeps, he didn’t think, and –

Behind him, Equius set a damp, chilly hand against his shoulder.  Steadier than Gamzee’s claws ever got.  He said, “Try to keep yourself together, Highblood,” in a voice he knew Gamzee would find motherfucking grating as a lecture in the middle of a raucous worship circus show.  “Isn’t it time to show your moirail you meant it when you said you believe in him?  Like I believe in Nepeta…  Some of your beloved ‘ _faith_.’”  

Gamzee didn’t always recognize it when people flirted with him, mind you.  Karkat gave him shit about that all the fucking time.  But Equius’s dig felt like some pitch hinting if he’d ever heard it – a challenge.  He glanced back, scowling so’s his makeup and his face were two motherfucking opposites.  Equius looked pleased, and Gamzee thought about the metallic, cold-iron closeness of his kiss for just a second.  There was something else to tell Karkat, when he finally got himself figured out enough to get into that shit.  _He taunted me, and I think it might’ve fucking worked._  

And then he was back with his moirail, admiring how calm Karkat seemed.  How he hadn’t reached for his sickles yet, just like Terezi said he shouldn’t.  Jade Harley’s hive was a labyrinth of left-behind things, but Karkat walked like he knew his motherfucking purpose and could be proud in it.    

Karkat passed by piles of stuffed animals with cutesy tentacles Feferi would have cooed over; he passed scribbled-over photographs with four friends squished close together at a human airport, smiling like no intergalactic alternate universe destinies were gonna drag them close.  Gamzee knew that feeling, brother.  In time, Karkat led the rest of his team into a room with a cluttered table in the corner and a gently made bed.  There was a ring still in its musty velvet box, and newspaper clippings about some spooky authoress with sharp pale hair and a smile like she knew everything and was just waiting for a brother to ask.

Maybe it was all that fear in the air, or maybe it was a link he could just barely taste, like the stale and numbing aftereffects of sopor pie on his tongue, but Gamzee gulped, “Shit – Karkat – she’s _here_ –” just in actual instant before his moirail froze.  His arms stiffened, and his sharp intake of breath sounded like the radio crackling out for just a second.  Like their whole communication had with Eridan and Sollux not too long ago, leaving them stranded in an even deeper emptiness.

Jade Harley had a gun against Karkat’s back, sharp and cold as Feferi’s blood against his spine.  She said, “Excuse me, but what the hell are you doing here?”


	6. It’s probably illegal to ask, “What would the Signless do,” right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again~~~ Happy Sunday!! 
> 
> Ah, so we've reached THIS chapter -- I've been nervous for this one. :P I hope you have fun with it, if you read~ I have different "quests" planned for each of the Beta Kids, and I really do hope I do them justice.... I wanted the approaches and interactions to be really different for everybody?
> 
> Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful day~

Here’s what Gamzee might’ve done, just then, if he’d been one of those important Subjugglators back in Alternian space.  One of the Empress’s clowns, thinkpan all sharp and fear-sparking, without all the melty sopor rot soaked through and slurring him.

He might’ve reached down for Jade Harley’s mind, and gotten her to drop that motherfucking gun.  He might’ve made her scream repentance, fleshy human hands clenched over her strange pale eyes.  He might have reminded her that those eyes could squish into a milky pulp beneath her own motherfucking fingers, if she pressed too hard; he might have screamed to her in a thousand gibbering voices how Karkat’d come to _talk_ , sister, and she best listen before righteous subjugglation was brought the fuck down on her dusty hive.  Might’ve.  That was what the holy rage shivering in his head meant.  Defend, protect, subjugglate.  Get that motherfucking mad scientist shit right out’ve here.  Who knew what would happen, if Jade fired that fucking thing?  A mystery Gamzee didn’t want answered; a scream he couldn’t release. 

But he _wasn’t_ one of those important Subjugglators, with chucklevoodoos to make Jade Harley toss her gun away like it burned her actual mind.  He couldn’t do any damn thing.  Even if Terezi had said he shouldn’t, said he shouldn’t _a lot of fucking times_ , Gamzee still imagined it.  Something had changed in him, since he’d learned to cull and rage. 

Behind him, Equius shook his shoulder, said, “You’re slipping, Highblood,” and the cold weight of his hand kept Gamzee in his chair.  Holding his motherfucking breath.  When was the last time Karkat had been threatened without him?  Without a scary clown moirail to break bones and chase motherfuckers away, if he had to?  If it came to that?  Fear was normal, on Alternia.  Threats were normal.  But Gamzee wasn’t usually on a motherfucking ship, way up in orbit, and one of the four heroes of an aquatic horrorterror’s prophesy wasn’t usually the one pointing a gun at someone that might’ve been almost, almost closer to him than his gods.  Dear as any motherfucker _could_ be. 

“It’ll be fine,” said Terezi.  “If Karkat plays his cards right, it’ll be fine.”

“ _What_ motherfucking cards, though?” Gamzee demanded, though he wasn’t really mad at Terezi.  She knew it, too, and she pointed back at the screen to show him what was what with a toothy smile.

Jade Harley didn’t shoot Karkat, though a couple times she said she was about to, and a couple times her finger squeezed up so close to the trigger Gamzee wished he could snap it right off.  They circled one another, assessing.  A pair of Legislacerators slick and vicious on the courtroom floor, at the feet of His Honorable Tyranny; a Subjugglator puppet-waltz, one partner leading the other by the mind and ready to end the show in blood.   

Karkat said he’d come to meet Jade – Dr. Harley.  That the whole planet and broken multiverse needed her, her specifically, and that he remembered her from a life he was pretty damn sure she knew something about, too.  What with the sparking portal-windows outside; what with the drawings of something called a “Prospit” along the wall of her respite block.  Gamzee hadn’t known all that “Remembering Jade Harley” shit, but then Karkat said _he_ hadn’t been too sure about it before, either.  Not until he saw her hive, saw her handwriting with its cheerful green ink. 

Jade didn’t answer any of that.  She said she’d picked up on Karkat’s Alternian tech the instant he landed, and that the _only_ reason she hadn’t teleported him off her island right a-fucking-way was his weird heat signature.  Not like the other soldiers sent to cull her – not like the soldiers that’d culled her fucking friend.  But if the Batterwitch had sent him to lure her out somehow, to confuse her, to get her to stop digging around where she wasn’t wanted, that stupid fancy royal fish had another think coming!  Jade’s voice was high-pitched and lilting, then; her hair was long, tied back at the nape of her neck.  It frizzed around her dark cheeks, around her sharper-than-sharp bones.  She wore huge, thick glasses. 

“You have no power here, in _my_ house,” Jade told Karkat, jabbing her gun into his side.  It sparked a little where it touched his clothes, with the same kind of shivering green energy as her barkbeast lusus had vanished into.  Left a patch near Karkat’s ribs all singed and smoking, and that shit hadn’t even gone off yet.  She’d let him ease around a little, slowly, slowly, so now he was half-facing her with his hands still raised.  “You left, and we’re definitely not stuck in some _game_ together this time.  Earth isn’t gonna be one of your worlds anymore!” 

“That’s good, Jade.  That’s _really good_ , that the Empress is gone.”  Karkat’s expression reminded Gamzee of illegal drawings people still made of the Sufferer, sometimes, only a little more snarly, with thicker eyebrows.  Patient and understanding; afraid but still willing to be calm as long as he could.  What the fuck would the actual Sufferer have done, cornered like Karkat was, begging an alien to join some kinda motherfucking battle-rebellion thing?  

Karkat knew Jade had sealed the room.  He knew one step out of it without her say-so would mean an agonizing death as pieces of him teleported themselves randomly around her island.  Jade had explained as much, around when she was taunting the “Batterwitch” about a cake processing plant of hers that had recently been destroyed.  (Whatever the fuck _that_ was all about.)   But Karkat seemed gentler with Jade than Gamzee felt, or Equius or Aradia or anybody up on his ship and watching them.  They were all gathered around the screen, then, brother, just like they’d gathered for Sollux and Eridan.  Just like they’d gathered together underneath the Juggling Eclipse, too, watching without being able to reach out and affect the course of their motherfucking sky.     

Jade said she wasn’t as afraid of the Condesce as she had been, once, and that she regretted hesitating to shoot, before. 

Karkat nodded and said that made a kind of sad sense, and that it _sucked_ about her friend, and that he wasn’t surprised she was developing teleportation technology after all he’d known she could do.

Karkat said: “We want the Empress completely gone from Earth – and gone from Alternia, too,” and Jade said, “Do you have any idea how many planets your queen has _slaughtered_?”

Karkat said: “I’m not working with any douchey fish queen, Jade.  C’mon.  Actually, she’d probably cull me faster than you would!” and Jade said, “That’s what the last one told me, too.  Or did you think I’d forgotten?  Your games are getting old, witch!”

Karkat said, “I – aw, fuck it.  Would it help if you could ask me for a shitty password, and I’d start yelling, or something?  Would it…  Would it help if I showed you my blood?”

_“No,”_ said Jade Harley.  And then, something in her face cleared.  She said, “Wait.  Password?”

“Please,” said Karkat.  “Please, Jade.  I wouldn’t have come into your hive looking for you if I didn’t genuinely believe we needed your help.”

Jade sighed.  She propped her gun up on her shoulder in what Equius remarked was a _very_ dangerous way to handle such unstable technology.

Jade said, “None of the Batterwitch’s soldiers have gone this long without taking out _some_ kind of murderclown slinky or giant fish-gun.  You’re _fighting_ her?  You really are?”

And Karkat said, “If ‘Batterwitch’ means who I think it does – yeah.”

“Huh,” said Jade.  “I’ll listen.  For…  Um, I’ll give you ten minutes?  And then maybe you _will_ have to guess my password!”

Karkat ran a nervous hand through his hair, and sucked in a deep breath like he was intentionally reining in whatever tirade had been building inside him.  He swallowed all those words down and said, “Fan-fucking-tastic.”

Then, Jade pulled a small zappy thing Gamzee didn’t recognize out of her jumpsuit, and Karkat’s transmission went dark.  She must’ve known he was sending signals out the whole motherfucking time.  Cut it off when the talks were gonna get personal.  When Karkat wasn’t just Batterwitch Soldier A, anymore.

“Benefit of the doubt,” said Terezi.  “We give her a few minutes, and then we check on him.”

Gamzee and Equius went to go get a second escape shuttle ready just in case, Gamzee all muttering rage and Equius keeping calm as the deep cold water Gamzee’s lusus liked best.  They didn’t even need to turn the motherfucking thing on in the end, though, ‘cause less than ten minutes later Jade Harley and Karkat were on their way up to join the rest of the Red Team.  Some motherfucking _magic_ , right there.  Tavros came to get them when Karkat’s transmission crackled back on, and the minute Gamzee saw his crooked little smile he knew shit was settling back down for a while.  Knew Karkat was back, and his insides stopped squirming so much.

Gamzee hadn’t needed to help, in the end, the way one of the Empress’s deadly hired mind-clowns might’ve done.  He ushered Karkat back onboard, when the time came, instead – he told him he was motherfucking _amazing_.  Karkat just rolled his eyes at that and pointed out that he hadn’t actually done much besides get a spooky alien gun pointed at him for a while.  They both knew that wasn’t true, though, Gamzee thought.  And if Karkat _didn’t_ know it, he’d try and build him up until he did. 

Gamzee wouldn’t say anything about the legacy of the Signless, probably, but maybe he wasn’t the only motherfucker thinking about it.  Right?  A unifier, a revolutionary.  A friend, who stories said offered words and words and words before he even activated his strife specibus.  Terezi might have been fiddling a little with the Signless’s band around her neck, earlier, now that Gamzee thought about it.

He wrapped an arm around Karkat, small and stubby-clawed, blood warmer than warm, but strong in a way Gamzee didn’t know.  Hell, strong in a way most of Alternia didn’t know.  And look, he’d gotten Jade up to their ship, alone.  Up on their ship and already teasing him about shit they only half-remembered, ruffling up his hair.

Jade asked, “Hey, this is Gamzee, right?” when he stumbled out to meet them, and Gamzee was like, “Shit, Karkat, you already told her about me?” so touched his smile might’ve split his face right open.

Karkat leaned into Gamzee just a bit, then, and for a second all his bones went limp as a corpse, limp as a murder clown’s ragdoll seeping pretty rainbow blood from between its stiches.  He grumbled, “Of course, dumbass.”  He knew Gamzee could hold him, would hold him as long as he needed to get himself held.  Knew Gamzee was big enough not to even let on he was holding anything at all. 

But soon, Karkat was back up and putting on a fiery leader-ish voice, guiding one of Feferi’s four heroes farther into the ship.  Jade pointed up at the paper moons Gamzee and Tavros had pinned in one of the halls and said, “Well, I do like _that_.” 

Gamzee reminded himself to try and get Karkat talking to him, later.  Talking about how he’d known Jade in their other lives or in whatever the fuck those dream clouds were, and what all he’d meant about those motherfucking passwords.  See if there was any righteous venting to get done, so’s to help whatever was weighing Karkat down get lifted.  Swatting smoke away with huge-ass Subjugglator claws.

Before all that noise, though, Terezi thought it was time to get Jade filled in on what all she’d just signed up for – but it was kind of amazing how much she already knew when they really got down to it.  She knew about the dream-clouds – apparently _those_ were the “Prospit?” – and when somebody first mentioned “horrorterrors” she sort of squeaked.  Said, “Oh, Rose is gonna _scream_ ,” like that was a really good fucking piece of news.  All this “Rose’s” books had horrorterrors in ‘em, apparently, and her authoress persona liked to muse all dark and velvety about them whispering to her.  Jade had always sort of half-believed it, but now…  _Now_.

Was Jade Harley willing to go back to Alternia with them, to try and rewrite the universe for their beat-up unreal timeline?  Sure, for a while at least.  As long as she got all her science shit in order back home, and maybe her dog friend Bec could come too.  What all else had she been doing her whole life anyway?  Since she was a little thing with tangled hair and bare feet, on an island in the middle of an unfriendly sea.   Almost alone once her grandpa-lusus died, too…  It was so familiar Gamzee might’ve squeezed her squishy human hand.  Some game called SBURB she and her friends were waiting for up and got itself canceled, and then – ever since what happened next, they’d all been different.  The world had been different. 

“I think I might have been waiting to do just this exact thing,” Jade said, earnest as a believer first peeling open the flap of a worship circus tent like they would learn to peel off a motherfucker’s skin.  “To say ‘screw it’ and fly away with a bunch of alien rebels to murder a scary fish Empress!”

“That’s the spirit!” chirped Aradia.  She’d liked Jade very much, ever since she saw all the dead things in her hive.  Especially when she learned one of those dead things had been Jade’s actual Ancestor, and that she could pass along some of the “corpse-preserving juice” she’d used if Aradia wanted it for the study of Earth burial customs.  Jade _had_ pointed out that her own family’s burial customs might’ve been a little unconventional, but Aradia hadn’t minded too much.

Jade spent a couple nights with them, then, helping work out the next steps of their plan and getting to know the ship.  She played trading card games with Gamzee and Tavros, and kicked their asses a couple times, too, even though she wasn’t _quite_ able to read Alternian yet without consulting a little key she’d scribbled out on graph paper.  She practiced flying with Terezi, too, and mimed shooting the Condesce’s satellites out of the sky with one of those giant smoking science weapons of hers.  She was like, “Ew, gross,” to a lot of the food they had on that ship just then, and offered to bring them back some stuff from Earth.  Earth soda?  It was pretty motherfucking okay. 

Jade also made it clear as anything that she was probably gonna be the easiest of the four heroes to recruit.  She’d been first, man.  First for a reason.

She could take them to the Seer of Light, though she might not talk to them.  She’d been bundled up deep by darker things, and Jade could barely reach her since she’d decided not to hand over a ring.  Some sort of strange human romance thing?   They’d been matesprits or something, though, for a little while…  And Jade said her kisses used to taste like motherfucking inky lipstick and toothpaste before they tasted like human alcohol.  That shit was something like sopor, from what Gamzee could gather.  Not quite, though.  Not _quite_ , but seeping deep in a person just the same, turning the mind to knotted yarn if a motherfucker didn’t know where to stop.  Jade had loved her, once, and she loved her still, though maybe not the way the Seer needed to be loved.

Jade could take them to the Heir of Breath, too, although after SBURB had been cancelled he wasn’t the same.  The Condesce had made sure of that, and now he was buried somewhere, under a pale white stone with Earth scribbling on it.  Jade said he wouldn’t be able to speak with them, or help in any kind of motherfucking divine quest, but they should definitely bring him some gag gifts and read dumb jokes and/or bad movie scripts over his grave.  Aradia looked very mischievous when she said _that_ part, though.  “He got culled?  I see,” Aradia said, “I think I know a little more about why I’m here.”  And Jade said, “What?”

And the Knight of Time.  Ah, brother, Jade couldn’t take them to the Knight of Time, ‘cause she’d seen nothing of him her own self, nothing in a long, long while except what he left in his wake.  Blood, mostly.  Blood humans didn’t even know to recognize as blood, from left-behind drones and Alternian soldiers stuck making baked goods for some reason.  Also, lots of cut-up Alternian tech, like Dave Strider was trying to slice at metal veins until the beast bled out.  He scrawled shitty cartoons on the ruins of Batterwitch bases, bases what got his best bro culled way back when.  No one knew Dave, not like they used to. 

The _sad_ just seemed to seep off Jade when she talked about her friends, dangling in the air like mist, so much so that Equius patted her awkwardly on the back and suggested he go get everyone something to drink.  He’d come a long way, Equius.  Gamzee was really beginning to see that, now.  He carried drinks on a tray just the way his butler lusus had.

They all, the Red Team, had a long fucking way to go, too.  All these human motherfuckers, hatched on a planet that wasn’t supposed to exist, for a destiny that could never make itself gospel…  Jade wouldn’t sleep in sopor slime, but after a while of absconding awkwardly when she wanted to get some rest she ended up curled on the floor of their actual helm.  Resting her head on her barkbeast lusus’s side, wrapping a blanket with those little cutesy horrorterrors on it close, close around herself.  Making do.  The humans had been “making do” their whole motherfucking lives. 

They were gonna reach out the Seer, next, but not even Terezi could say how that was gonna go.  Rose Lalonde had made herself a dead spot, she said, and all her roads seemed smudged away.  She never looked at the camera in author bio pictures, and she said the horrorterrors whispered all the time.


	7. Could WE have dressed up like Earth wizards, too?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey~~~ Almost done with February – I hope you’ve had a great month. :) I ALSO hope you enjoy this chapter, and that I’m doing okay by Rose so far! I’m sorry for any and all problems or mistakes. 
> 
> Thanks for sticking with this story so long!! :D I appreciate it, and I’ll see you next week with chapter 8~

Gamzee and Karkat _did_ get a little time alone together, before they headed down to earth and something Jade kept calling a “Foyles Bookshop.” 

They were gonna try to grab Rose Lalonde at a book signing, see?  The Seer of Light didn’t do a whole ton of those, apparently, and photographs of her face straight-on were always forbidden.  (The few that had trickled on to the human internet against her will showed her warped, of course, with a cold absence squirming in her eyes and skin gone still and seamless like polished stone.  They only made her books more popular, in the end, but Rose was pretty motherfucking cold about it.  Nobody could say _why_ for sure though, ‘cause she tended to stay in character all the time interacting with fans.  She wasn’t Rose Lalonde at all, but some over-the-top eldritch visitor, who’d let a motherfucker take pictures of her costumes and the crooked sigils painted on her palms but would always hiss about shit not meant to be seen by sensitive mortal eyeballs.  The photos were mostly written off as staged publicity stunts, their takers left sulking around on conspiracy theory forums.)

Jade sort of walked everybody through what all they should expect.  Rose would have lace dripping out of her motherfucking sleeves, a brooch at her throat with silvery grasping tentacles and scattered diamonds like eyes or stars or both.  Jade would ask her to get human coffee with them, and she’d hopefully tease a little because Jade didn’t normally drink coffee.  Something like that?  Jade had paced around the helm of their ship, working out exactly what she could say to her old matesprit, mussing up her hair with those bony, restless hands of hers.  She’d made her voice all low and silky, doing Rose’s parts in their back-and-forth, and in the end Tavros had applauded all awkwardly like he was at some very confusing circus.  Cute, right?

But Gamzee and Karkat managed to grab some time to watch Earth romcoms, for a lot of those motherfucking planning stages.  Mostly to get a feel for the place – and also maybe just ‘cause Karkat liked watching the humans fall into their one complicated, possibly-unnamed quadrant together.  He used Gamzee as a sort of pillow/chair hybrid, leaning into him so Gamzee could’ve rested his chin right in his moirail’s hair.  Karkat folded Gamzee’s arms around himself, and they waited together.  Waited for Jade to get her nerves up, and all.

After a while, Karkat talked.  Like he thought the coast was clear, then.  Like Gamzee’s arms were soft and safe enough that he could peel just a little way out of his shell.  It started out real slow, and Gamzee barely believed it was coming almost unprompted – Karkat showed Gamzee the singed meat on his side where Jade’s alien gun had burned just like Alternia’s own sun.  He talked about how he was relieved Jade actually seemed to like him so far, and she wasn’t holding her broken universe over his head the way he’d sort of expected. 

“It’s just – _my fault_?  You know?  And before you ask, no, I’m not even completely sure what ‘it’ I’m talking about.  Pick something from the list, right?”

“What list, bro?”  

“Uh…  Shit.  You know what?  It doesn’t matter.  It’s just guilt.  Ever since we saw ourselves – our real selves – I’ve been having these dreams about _guilt_.”

“Something that happened with Jade?  The humans?”

“That’s part of it.”  Karkat’s eyes were huge and raging, when he shifted around to glance at Gamzee, then.  Raging at his own motherfucking self, the way Karkat always raged best.  “Something with the humans, and with _you_ …  I think I was the leader, Gamzee.  Somehow.  And I failed!  And even if I do everything right this time, that feeling…  I don’t know if it can ever go away.” 

Gamzee thought of Nepeta’s blood hardening up his arms, olive and sharp-smelling and splattered like moss on the side of Jade’s mysterious crumbling frog worship circus.  He knew about guilt.  About feeling dirtied by blood he never even fucking spilled.  He said, “Oh shit, my brother.  That’s a heavy thing you’ve been carrying around.  But you wanna hear how I think on it?”

Karkat nodded, not turning himself around to meet Gamzee’s eye, that time.  He felt that nod, though, soft against his chest.

“ _You are the realest Karkat I’m ever gonna know._   That’s the gospel motherfucking truth of it.”  Gamzee felt his voice getting sort of sing-song, then, like he was praying, but he didn’t think Karkat would tease him.  “You and me, we have to burn down what isn’t the truth for us in our own minds, or couldn’t it just swallow us up whole?”

Karkat seemed to think a second.  He sighed, leaning back into Gamzee’s cold skin, against his wrinkled t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that almost didn’t fit him anymore.  Gamzee brushed his claws so, so gently against Karkat’s arm, down his wrist and across the warm, dry knuckles he kept clinched so much of the fucking time.  Karkat said, “You’re real, too, far as I’m concerned,” in a very quiet voice.  Like he was telling secrets all of a sudden.

Gamzee could smell Karkat’s blood, warm and sweet in the air, from where Jade had burned him a little.  Muted, now.  He said, “We can let that other Karkat make his own mistakes, maybe.”

And, “Maybe,” Karkat echoed, sounding tired and not entirely convinced.  But he’d told Gamzee what was up, or started to.  Not like how it’d gone down with his motherfucking blood at all.  Maybe their diamond was getting stronger.  There was a time when Karkat wouldn’t have wanted Gamzee’s philosophical advice, not even a little motherfucking bit.  And now, it seemed to smooth him out a little.  Made a brother feel valuable.  “I do want to know what I fucked up, though.”

“What _he_ fucked up,” said Gamzee, thinking it was better to draw some kinda line in the motherfucking sand right then and there.

“If you say so,” said Karkat.  “Now shh, let’s just watch the movie.”

Yeah.  So that time was a little blessing, the Messiahs being kind even as Gamzee hung out a universe away from any worship circus spilling out laughter and blood to honor them.  But the mission came next, brother, and Rose Lalonde wasn’t gonna be reading at another human book place anytime soon. 

As maybe could’ve been expected from a mad scientist type, Jade had a few fancy tech options she offered up for this next trip down to Earth.  First, she suggested that teleporter thing she’d been working on, assuring them how it’d _probably_ keep all a motherfucker’s bones inside.  Equius gave it a hard pass, though, even if Jade _had_ used it to teleport herself all around her island.  She’d been trying to harness her lusus’s lightning and zappy powers, or something…  Equius said that was motherfucking badass as anything, and he _had_ to hear more about it later – roughly translated from Equius-speak – but also Rose Lalonde was gonna be in a place called human London to read.  She hadn’t been back to her home much, not since her mom-lusus died in an “accident” Jade didn’t really get into detail about.  Something to do with human alcohol and a machine that could clone mutant purrbeasts?  Anyway.  London was pretty motherfucking far from Jade’s island.  Far from, you know, _space_ , too.  

But Jade also offered the use of some motherfucking amazing Alternian tech she’d lifted from a couple of the Empress’s soldiers who’d come to her island just like Karkat had, only actually trying to cull her.  They’d let a motherfucker blend in just great, even without some sort of hat to hide their horns like Karkat had tried wearing.  Apparently, using one of those things got you so human you could camp out there undetected for sweeps.  It was what the Empress had used, herself, when she was sticking around.  She’d stayed Earthside long enough to be John’s great-grandmother for a while, whatever that meant.  Before she went and motherfucking culled the guy.

Jade had three of the little personal cloak thingies to hand out, so she passed those suckers on to Karkat, Aradia and Gamzee for that particular trip.  Karkat because he said he knew about relationship shit, and Jade and Rose had both broken each other’s hearts up pretty good so far.  Aradia because she might actually enjoy Rose’s motherfucking horrorterror books, and it’d be better if Rose thought her work had been enjoyed.  And Gamzee ‘cause he could beat up anything that was asking for that holy murdermirth, couldn’t he?  Also, Jade said Rose would probably think he was kinda funny. 

So Jade and Equius spent a good long while setting that shit up – what all they had to do, exactly, Gamzee didn’t have the slightest idea.  He and Karkat tried reading through a couple summaries of Rose’s novels on the human internet, but there were always a gazillion characters with five names each – a whole lot of meddling with arcane artifacts, too, and communing with scheming ancient gods.  Felt kinda like Gamzee’s own dreams, to be real with you.

A tall, willowy undead woman in gaudy gemstone silks seemed to wander through a lot of those motherfucking novels, too.  Her voice reminded Gamzee of Kanaya, sort of – the human “Wikipedia” said it was described in a lot of funny ways, shit like “when she spoke it was a staircase, curling down and down, measured and polished very clean, leading you onward.”  Probably that meant she talked all proper and sure, right?  _Kanaya_.  “Undead” even meant “rainbow drinker,” a lot of the fucking time, so there you go!

Karkat looked Rose up on the human equivalent of Prongle, too, and Jade was ready to go before they’d even made a dent in her sea of sly and morbid eldritch abomination joke posts. 

It felt weird and tingly, wearing that personal shield thing – like Gamzee was wrapped up in motherfucking psionics, and they were prickling down through his meat and bones like trolls had done for very special surgeries.  It was even weirder looking at Karkat, there, Karkat with squishy human cheeks and his eyes dulled to a red-brown Jade said was just like some fancy human’s polished mahogany furniture might be.  Gamzee could feel his own claws, brother, but where the fuck were they when he looked at his hands?  Karkat smoothed Gamzee’s hair down, a little, before they left, and Gamzee leaned over to let him do it just how he felt it should get done.  Karkat said he liked how Gamzee would still be pretty easy to see up above any kind of human crowd, and his voice sounded strange when he said it.  More like a mammalian lusus-moan.  But Gamzee was happy he could pretty much tell all his moirail’s expressions through the humanity.  Way easier to read than a mostly-stranger like Jade’s face.

Earth London was cold, full of blank-eyed stone statues (lots of giant maned purrbeasts) and clumsy human vehicles turning corners so fast it was kind of amazing they didn’t flip over. Reminded Gamzee a little of searching around for Sollux’s communal hive stem with Eridan.  There were fancy drink stores, just the same as in that Alternian city, and theaters where maybe circus acts would whirl themselves into a blood-bleary frenzy every night.  But probably not.  Probably something human Gamzee hadn’t learned about yet? 

Back in Sollux’s home city, motherfuckers might’ve stared at him ‘cause he was a highblood clown off wandering without his circus troop – who knew what the fuck he was plotting, yeah?  On Earth, though, maybe people stared ‘cause there was just something intrinsically _other_ about him, a shiver in the air that was his personal cloak.  Or else maybe it was ‘cause he was wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, still, as a brisk snow began to fall.  (Not the clothes with his name-sign, though.  This shirt was an ad for one of Jade’s inventions.)

The Earth air smelled different, sort of, full of wetness and bright Karkat-blood.  They followed Jade, and Aradia murmured a little – human eyes wide and fresh and still so _hers_ – about how many voices she felt shifting under that city, huddling with the trains and beneath the dirty river.  How many ghosts were camped out and watching, here.

Gamzee only fell behind a couple times as they headed to Rose’s bookshop place.  Once when he stopped to gape at a human frozen like another purrbeast statue and painted up all bronze, so’s he might’ve not even been a breathing thing, and then again when a human with a clipboard grabbed him and got him to sign a name he made up on something he didn’t fully understand.  Something involving preserving an old historic hospital?  Huh.

Each time, Karkat stormed back and grabbed on to him – by the shirt, by the wrist.  He drew him up with everybody else, and hissed about how terrible it would be if he got lost.  Gamzee kept up as well as he could after that, brother, and after a while they were there.  Rose’s bookstore had a slick front, all windows and steel, with fingerprints along the glass from where people had been peering in at all those motherfucking books.  Gamzee felt flickers of fear from inside the place, but when he muttered as much all low and confused, like the purple chucklevoodoo sparks at the edges of his vision might’ve belonged to some other motherfucker, Jade just said it probably meant Rose had already started up her reading.  It _was_ a delicious sort of fear, like clowns might’ve felt at a revel for the awe and terror of the Vast Honk to come.       

Maybe Gamzee would’ve gotten a little more from Rose’s reading if he knew what the fuck was going on in the book at the time – all the _horror_ was sort of lost on him, though, stumbling in after it’d started and finding seats in the back.  Could’ve been the dusty, old-timey language too, though.

Rose smiled as she read, a little cruelly, a little sweet, and the way Jade watched her might have been longing.  She said _she’d_ chosen not to go through with whatever kind of human ritual meant rings in velvet boxes, sure, but then she looked at Rose flutter her lace-gloved fingers delicately above the pages of her text – describing an old wizard with moss in his beard crumbling to dust at the heroine’s feet – like she had so many things still left to say.  Jade had dressed up, too – she had on a long clean skirt with pockets, and her hair was braided prettily with smooth blue ribbon.  First time any of them had seen her out of a jumpsuit.

Rose read about her heroine doing some kinda shit with an ancient book, parts of which had been smeared out in weirdly familiar purple blood.  Huh.  Wonder if _that_ could’ve been important…  Rose read about the whisperings of a god so vast and far away, drowned under oceans and crawling beneath your skin, in your blood, nestled deep in the folds of your mind like a song you’d got stuck in your thinkpan.  Rose read about the Kanaya-sounding lady, again, and around the time she melted into a cloud of ghostly pale moths and scattered across the world to solve some kinda wizard-mystery Karkat was nudging Gamzee in the side like, “Okay, if that’s not Kanaya I’ll wear whatever over-the-top fancy clothes she picks out for me for a sweep.”

Imagining Karkat dressed as one of Rose’s velvety, spooky pit-eyed wizards almost made Gamzee snort laughter there in the back of the book reading.  The look might’ve worked for Eridan, though.   

They waited in line, next, beside fans with battered copies of Rose’s novels, beside cosplayers Jade assured them _probably_ didn’t usually dress like wizards and tentacle deities during their everyday human lives.  Rose addressed all these motherfuckers as their characters – she sat behind a table and signed books, maybe sometimes bantering with bookshop staff who happened to be straightening up nearby.  Once or twice she took a swig from a strange-smelling thermos under her desk, but everybody either didn’t notice or just wouldn’t know what it could mean.  Jade had told them it was probably coffee with some sort of sweet liquor swimming inside, for the nerves.  For the guilt of an incorrect universe, which was something that might’ve clicked with Karkat a little more then than Jade could know.    

When Rose saw them, her eyes widened a little bit beneath their heavy lids, beneath their layers of smoky grey-violet and eyeliner.  She said, “You,” and for a moment Gamzee thought he could feel the spectral tentacles woven through her ribs and squeezing her heart a little tighter with every beat.  The comfort they gave her, the knowing and the distance.  Rose was swaying up above the vastness of something inhuman, something un-troll, something like what Feferi was becoming back on Alternia.  She was giving herself over, falling, falling.

Aradia said, “Us?” all cheerfully, already picking up a copy of Rose’s latest book to get that shit signed. 

Jade offered up a little, “Hi, Rose!” and it sounded like she was in a sort of pain.  Reminded Gamzee of when he’d first seen Tavros, after he’d offered makeouts and gotten an awkward, stilted non-answer.  Reminded Gamzee of wondering if he should say his hellos at all, after that, or if maybe the other motherfucker was better off without them.  He’d been happy he came back as a brother’s friend, with Tavros, and maybe Jade would be, too?

But Rose said, “I never thought I’d see you at another one of these.  Are you going to take me away with you, again?  That was so romantic, last time.  Maybe you’ll bring me somewhere we used to go?  Hold my books, like we’re in a school hallway and you’re thinking about going with me to the prom?”

“No.  Um.  Not exactly…  I just need to talk, for a few minutes?”  Jade seemed to be forgetting her lines, getting stared down exactly how she’d _warned_ them Rose liked to stare people down.  Karkat kicked Jade’s foot in what he probably thought was a real nice and discreet kind of way.  It was a little too stomp-y for Jade’s taste, though, Gamzee could tell.  “We could…  You know!  We could get coffee.”

But Rose ducked her head, lip twisting up just _so_ – just so that Gamzee felt he almost remembered her from somewhere.  Her face was familiar, close up…  Someone who hid him in his dreams, now and then, and someone whose horns he could never remember when he woke up.  Maybe it was because she’d never had motherfucking horns?  Someone who hid him from Kanaya, who made jokes he didn’t understand the first time around.  Someone who had written the kind of dusty, it’ll-take-sweeps-to-read books that seemed to be selling pretty okay, now. 

“ _Things are changing_ ,” Jade said.  “I need – I _need_ to talk to you.” 

Rose’s voice was low, deep in her chest.  She said, “’Changing’ – yes.  If I go with you now, I know what could happen.  I can feel it.  Maybe you will make me laugh, again.  Maybe I will learn to forget; I will move on.  Maybe I will _forgive_ you, or finally understand?”  Pretty dramatic shit to say to a person, except it _could_ have sounded like she was in character, maybe.  Someone behind them in line whispered, _“Wait, is that girl dressed as somebody?  Should we know her?”_

And, “I’m just asking you for coffee,” said Jade.  “Then, we’ll see.”

“Things can never be as they were meant to be, and I have no reason to trust you in this life.  Do I need to remind you why?”  Rose’s breath smelled of something sharp and poisonous, deep, deep down – like Gamzee’s must have, not too motherfucking long ago.  A little like sopor-rot.  The humans wouldn’t be able to tell it, not past mints and perfume, the smell of books all around.  Their senses just weren’t the same, Jade had told him. 

Jade said, “Not really,” and she sounded kinda defeated.  Like she knew Rose could cut her a new one, right there, and she wouldn’t have had anything to say back, yet.  Like she was thinking about antique haunted rings she’d hunted down and kept in velvet boxes; rings she’d hinted at, laughing and kissing Rose’s neck until she sighed, but then never handed over.

Rose’s human heart pounded, and fear fizzled inside her skull like something sparkling and fresh that Gamzee could’ve reached out and held in his claws if he’d wanted to.  Fear for their useless world, for her own fallen-apart friends, for her mom-lusus who died without anyone there to whisper comfort to her.  But the horrorterrors squeezed tighter, and that fear was smothered back into unknowing.  That fear closed its eyes and went to sleep.

Rose said, “Hardbacks are fifteen pounds, softcovers are ten,” and for the first time her voice was almost kind.  When Aradia bought two softcover books, with money Jade had slipped her earlier – one for herself and one for Eridan (because he still loved all that wizard shit even if he would threaten a brother with Ahab’s Crosshairs for suggesting it) – Rose asked whether she knew her from somewhere.  Whether they’d gone to college together, maybe.  She looked at Gamzee for a long time, too, but something behind her eyes was as closed as the door to a crumbling wizardly mausoleum in one of her books. 

She could have seen, even then, but she didn’t.  Wasn’t motherfucking ready to?  The Seer had to open her eyes, with all the pain that came with doing a fucking dangerous thing like that.  Mourning what had been that she had convinced herself she couldn’t have.  She had turned all those horrorterror-whispers into wants and novels instead of battle plans, ‘cause how could she have known she might ever need anything else?  It was one thing to write about Kanaya, hungrily; it was another motherfucking thing entirely to think you’d ever get to meet her and learn about quality romantic rainbow drinker fiction or get your hair styled by actual force. 

Rose wrote kind greetings in the front of both Aradia’s books, but wouldn’t respond to anything else Jade said to her.  It sort of look like she wanted to – like an angry _“Why?”_ was always just at the edge of her flat, wet human tongue – but Gamzee knew what it was like to feel done with shit you couldn’t motherfucking control.  Waiting for what’d never come true, or come home when you needed someone with you on the edge of your grey beach…  Waiting for a world that wasn’t.

“I hope you like this one,” Rose whispered to Aradia, breaking character for just an apologetic second.

Aradia said, “I’ll probably be sending you some fan letters in a couple days.  To be completely honest with you.”

Rose laughed, intentionally not glancing back over at the soft, soft way they all knew Jade was looking at her.  She said something in a syrupy, eldritch non-tongue, smiling just for Aradia.  Maybe to be nice; maybe to make a point to Jade?  The crowd murmured behind them, clutching their wizard books and saying shit like, _“I was hoping she’d talk like the elder gods for us!  Do you think she’ll let me record it?”  _

Rose drawled something ominous about how if she spoke like that _too_ often, she’d never be able to slip back into her human voice.  She said she’d try to read Aradia’s letter, when it came.  Then, Gamzee and his team headed back out into the snow.


	8. How could I have gone so long without knowing these stories, bro?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again~~ If you've made it this far in the story -- AHH, thank you for sticking with it so long!! I hope you enjoy the chapter. :') If you're a newcomer who clicked the fic for the first time -- welcome!! I hope you have fun with the story, if you read it~ All in all: behold, chapter 8!! A lot of things happen in this one, ahahaha. It's kind of long, oops.
> 
> (Also: the cafe with the plants on the ceiling is vaguely based off a pub I've been to. Idk. It felt like it might be fun.)

Everybody already down on Earth _did_ end up going to a café for human coffee, even without Rose Lalonde.  Leaving her back with her fans, in all their motherfucking Eridan-y wizard outfits, talking in fancy language with a lot of references to ancient not-quite-made-up gods that Gamzee didn’t get.  She would sign books in handwriting even twirlier than Feferi’s, and _Fef_ had gotten schoolfed like an actual fucking Heiress all her sweeps.  (Who knew if she could still write the same, though, with whatever her hands were becoming back on Alternia?  Gamzee decided not to think on that shit, right then.) 

Maybe they went the café ‘cause Karkat was curious about how much he’d end up hating human coffee, or maybe they went because Aradia wanted to get a couple pages into Rose’s book to start working on how she’d approach her next. 

(They figured this first Rose Lalonde Encounter probably went about as well as it could have, given how pissed off she was and how closed her motherfucking eyes were.  Now that Aradia had her foot in the door a little – with Rose wondering whether she knew her from somewhere and actually breaking fucking character for her – it was pretty much decided that she should try contacting her playfully, earnestly.  Slipping in shit about their other lives, about that motherfucking character with the moths and the blood-sucking that was probably Kanaya.  Ideally Rose would notice and maybe ask a couple questions, so the conversation could happen on her own spooky Seer terms.  It was worth a try, Jade had said.  Rose was notoriously curious, and also pretty good at replying to her mail. 

Jade _also_ said Rose didn’t used to speak the ancient tongues of the eldritch gods so fluently; it was coming easier, coming to claim her voice.)

Maybe they _really_ went to the café because Jade kept glancing back at the bookshop, hopelessly, chewing on her lip.

“We were best friends, before we dated,” she said.  To Karkat, or to the dirty sidewalk.  “Sometimes I dream about being best friends again, and I wake up feeling so…  So…”

Anyway, whatever the motherfucking reason, they got coffee at someplace with potted plants hanging upside down on the ceiling.  Jade said that was actually kinda quirky and not-normal for an Earth restaurant, and Gamzee was like, “Oh, shit, brother.  And the dirt doesn’t even fucking _fall out_ , somehow!” for a lot longer than probably anyone wanted him to be. 

They sat at squeaky chairs by an equally squeaky wooden table, and the room was dark and warm all around them, reminding Gamzee a little of a hive like Nepeta’s.  A hive that was actually a cave, you know?  Other human motherfuckers sat here and there, too, scattered through the building like chess pieces around a board, hunched over food and coffees and finger-smudgy cups of human alcohol.  Nobody seemed to look at them too hard.  Except one time when Karkat’s voice raised up into almost-screaming territory, but otherwise, yeah.  It was pretty calm, and nobody seemed to give a shit about a bunch of strangers murmuring about how sweet human coffee was, and how none of the syrups came in more traditional bug-based flavors.

They talked about a few different things, camping out as the snow came down harder and harder outside, and probably most of the humans painted up like bronze statues hurried off to their communal hive stems or whatever the fuck.  They talked about whether or not Jade’s lusus could teleport them all the way back to Alternia instantaneously – the most agreed-upon answer being, _“Maybe, but at what weird, possibly death-inducing cost?”_ – and they talked about where _exactly_ the milk Equius had been offering Jade came from.  (It turned out she probably didn’t really wanna know.) 

After a while, though…  After Aradia had provided commentary on the first chapter of Rose’s book, and after Gamzee had swapped out his human coffee for some soda and a kind of Earth sliced tubers with lots of salt…  Jade stopped talking.  She fiddled with the long bones of her fingers, like some Subjugglators might fiddle with another motherfucker’s severed hands while waiting for their next act to begin.  She seemed restless, like she didn’t want to go back to the ship, or to her home on that lonely Earth island, but she didn’t actually wanna sit there, either.

And then Karkat asked, real quiet, “Why didn’t you do the stupid ring ceremony thing with Rose Lalonde?  You don’t have to tell us, but it might help if you do.”

“I know,” said Jade.  “It’s just – I didn’t want to get into it.  Considering, I think you might actually _know_ her…”

“Know who?” Aradia asked, without looking up from Rose’s novel.  She had her strange human cheek all squished up in her palm, and her eyes were happy and half-lidded as she read.  If Gamzee wasn’t getting fucking confused somewhere, it sort of sounded like Aradia already knew the answer.  He might’ve, too, thinking about it.

“Whoever it is that keeps popping up in her books!” Jade growled.  Not like a Subjugglator growl, gravely and crackling with highblood rage, chucklevoodoos all along the edges – it made Gamzee think a little more of Jade’s barkbeast lusus, actually.  There was some electric potential, there.  There was some righteous hurt he could feel soaking up her mind like the corpse-preserving juice she must’ve slathered her lusus/ancestor guy in.  “That woman, who can turn into moths?  Vampire-whatever.  Her.  Rose told me she dreams about her – said the horrorterrors talk about her – and she feels almost _real_.”  

“Hm,” said Karkat.  He leaned over to grab up one of Gamzee’s sliced salt-tuber things.  Nodded a little at the taste, like it was marginally better than he’d expected.

“I think,” Jade cleared her throat.  “I think she might _be_ real.  And I think Rose knows it, too…  Um.  So, yeah, I got the ring.  Yeah, I made promises – I meant them, at the time.  But then I read what she was working on, and I…”

“I’m sorry,” said Karkat.  His voice was gentle, hesitant.  The Knight of Blood, Feferi had called him, and that “Blood” meant bonds and a warmth Alternia’d forgotten on purpose, meant building some shit up together.  It was this side of him that could pap Gamzee quiet even when highblood elastic rage sizzled all through him, too, filling the holes sopor had left inside. 

“It was like – this world is incomplete.  _She feels incomplete_ ,” Jade said.  “And I know I’m not the right person to fix that.  I can try to be, but the more she writes, the more it feels like I’m not.  But we were best friends, before, and…”  Jade buried her face in her hands, just for a second.  She took a watery breath.  Taking in the smells of that human restaurant place – the oil, the coffee.  All the other humans, with their sweet blood and clothes-soap stink.  “She never really got why I broke it off.  She tried to analyze me, my – my mind, but.  It’s not that I don’t love her.  I don’t think I can make her happy, and we don’t actually see this _world_ the same way.”

“You miss her,” Gamzee said.  “I get that, sis.”

“I’ll always miss her,” said Jade, but Karkat snorted at that.  Said they weren’t giving up yet, not by a long shot.  Aradia was gonna reach out to Rose soon.  Try and figure out what could get her to question, to listen.  Get her to try out some motherfucking faith, believing in what all they could make out of their unshaped, unholy universe. 

Jade took a long sip of coffee – even though, y’know, she’d said she couldn’t really stand the stuff – and when she was done Karkat scooted his still mostly-full cup over to her.  (Earth “Mochas” didn’t really seem to be a thing he could get behind, turned out.)  When she got a little calmer, a little sniffling and apologetic though she didn’t fucking need to be – when Karkat talked just a little about Kanaya Maryam and what she and Rose might have had in another life – it was time to move on.  Jade seemed more solid, after that.  Vindicated, even if the hurt was still motherfucking grabbing onto her like a pair of sharpened clown-claws stretching out from the flickering shadows a motherfucker forgot to watch in the comfort of their hive.

“So she was real,” Jade said.  “ _Is_ real.  And… And you said she’s a _jade_ blood?  That’s… Kinda funny, honestly.  She sounds nice.”

“She’d probably love Rose’s book, too,” Aradia added.  “What with all the undead people.  And the fancy clothes.”

“I’m glad,” said Jade, and despite everything else it sounded like she meant it.

They might’ve gone back to the ship around then, except it was still snowing pretty hard and Karkat figured they should call back in first.  Nobody seemed to question a bunch of motherfuckers clumped together in an alley, in whatever the fuck that human London place was normally like, staring down at a little communications device cupped in Jade’s hands.  Shit seemed to be going pretty okay up at home.  Terezi had been researching the Knight of Time’s infamous web comic – “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff” – and was really getting a motherfucking kick out of it.  Tavros and Equius had been playing with Jade’s lusus, trying to keep him occupied so’s no more helm computers got sizzled with green lightning shit.  He’d “fetched” a couple Earth satellites, though – they hoped that was cool.  Nothing important, probably.  (Equius had suggested Tavros just commune with the beast, slip his way into his chipper, tail-wagging barkbeast head – but Tav wanted to make friends with him first.  Good old Tavros.)

Around when the conversation was wrapping the fuck up, Aradia suggested they take this chance… While she was still on Earth, and _not_ trying to scrounge around for shit to prove Feferi’s plan to Rose Lalonde and draw her out from behind those crypt-door eyes of hers…  To go visit John Egbert.  The Heir of Breath, only one of the four motherfucking heroes not breathing. 

Jade looked at her a little funny, then, and said, “While _you’re_ on Earth, specifically?”  But Aradia just said she hoped it would be a happy surprise, and squeezed Jade’s human shoulder a little.  Asked her to please put some motherfucking faith in her.  Jade said she’d try.  

(Maybe it was good that Karkat pulled Jade aside as they set off, asking how she’d feel if she got to talk to John again.  Jade said she’d be thrilled, so long as it didn’t mean she’d just died, too. That was _probably_ permission to all summon some motherfucking ghosts?  Karkat took it as permission, anyway, so Gamzee figured he might as well just follow his moirail’s lead.)

And that was how they ended up flying low over one of Earth’s quiet oceans.  They didn’t swoop past even one lusus-brawl, as hulking sea monsters dueled over territory or to protect some young wiggler charge’s hive.  It was mostly crowds of cackling dolphins and those dreamy, ponderous whales, brother.  Birds the same kinda white as dirty paper, with salt caked in their feathers and bright beady eyes.  Shit that killed to survive, sure, but this was a sea without any horrorterror gods beneath it, Jade said.  The kinda sea with more pleasure ships – humans sprawled out on their backs, taking in the lukewarm sun – than there were motherfucking gore-scabbed pirates.  Most of the creatures under Earth’s oceans would never taste troll blood, drifting down through the murk after some kinda dumb shit like a seadweller FLARPing adventure gone wrong.  Blood like airy colorful acrobat clown’s streamers, smooth in the water, swished around by invisible claws.  Yeah.  Same shit could _not_ be said for most every creature back home. 

Gamzee had never thought to believe in Earth’s kinda ocean.  He would have been able to wade his feet into one of these warm seas…  He’d have been able to swim a little ways out after his lusus before something came to make him bleed. 

They flew over all that gentle water, then, and over something Jade called the “US.”  It wasn’t gonna take as long for them to reach John’s hive as it might’ve for a human ship, but it was still a long motherfucking time.  Aradia read the rest of Rose’s book, and Jade told them all where exactly it was they were up and going.  John Egbert’s home was in Washington State, over by one of Earth’s other oceans, past fields of rustling golden and brown, past mountains _without_ a bunch of busted ships and desperate half-eaten corpses crawling over their spines, past cities that thrummed with music Gamzee had never heard.  There were dripping, wet trees in Washington, and lots of other living green Earth stuff.  John’s dad-lusus would still have wiggler play things out in their yard, Jade was sure, even though his young charge was long, long culled. 

It was a motherfucking huge way to fly _especially_ ‘cause they had no sopor to sleep in.  Gamzee almost crashed the ship flailing his way through a nightmare, actually – he’d been trapped in some familiar cold chest that smelled like old, half-frozen corpses.  He knew he was chained in there, and everybody wanted him gone.  Gone as prophesy, gone as paradise planet, gone as – gone as his own voice inside his head, when the gods took over.  He must’ve fucked up, _really_ fucked up, and maybe if he knew everything he’d done he’d want his own self locked away, too, but –

But Gamzee woke up to Karkat holding him, smoothing the purple fizzing tears off his cheeks and out of his hair.  Whispering about how safe he was, just then, but how bad it would be if he subjugglated their steering equipment on accident.  It was kinda motherfucking humiliating to have lost his shit like that – barely knew Jade, right? – but Karkat broke him free as easy as bleeding.  They stopped for food soon after, too, and Gamzee started feeling better quick enough. 

They stayed overnight at a motel with a leak in the ceiling and a tired, smiley receptionist guy who asked a lot of motherfucking questions.  They played I-Spy out the window until Karkat almost challenged Jade to a motherfucking duel for “spying” Earth cows five times in a row. 

Possibly the most exciting thing about their Earth-travels happened on the last motherfucking day.  Gamzee wasn’t so sure how the conversation started up, exactly, but Aradia was showing him all her favorite creepy bits from Rose’s novel one time when Karkat and Jade started talking about romance in an actually sort of _happy_ way. 

There was a scene in that motherfucking book where one of the many, many protagonist wizards got stuck in a winding, dusky labyrinth of purple stone steps and murderous towers which Aradia said felt familiar as the weight of her own horns.  Gamzee listened about all that while Jade described the first time she and Rose had tried writing a book together, and what kind of eldritch technicolor “furry” abominations it had featured.  And there was this _other_ scene Rose had come up with where a girl stabbed out a wizard who specialized in foodcraft’s eyes with a pair of knitting needles, right?  Aradia seemed pretty damn sure that meant Rose remembered stuff from _multiple_ motherfucking lives, maybe, or else was really amazingly good with details.  Enough to overwhelm most trolls, she said.  Uh – and most humans, too.  Gamzee knew he had enough to dream about with his own second motherfucking timeline, and sometimes he fantasized about shedding _that_ life like a slitherbeast skin.  What would he have done with even more lying, blasphemous lives?   

But also…  _Also_ , Gamzee half-heard something that made his insides feel all airy and strange, while he and Aradia were talking about timelines and shit.  Something a motherfucker might’ve thought he’d heard before, in all his sweeps with Karkat, giving him commentary on the romcom scripts he wrote, sleeping suspended and close enough to touch.  Traveling through actual cracks in the universe side-by-motherfucking-side.  But he _hadn’t_ heard it before, Gamzee was sure.  A brother would remember that sort of palest consoling doctrine.  Unless maybe Karkat only told him while he was too lost in the sopor to hear it?  Karkat met Gamzee’s eyes, as he talked, looking all knowing and smug like, _“Hey, remember this?”_   He nodded, and Gamzee nodded back, not sure what all else to do.

Anyway, Karkat told Jade when all he’d first realized he could be pale for Gamzee Makara.  Or, as he put it, when he’d first known he could motherfucking promise away his diamond to a ridiculous sopored-up clown…  Same difference.  It’d been a couple things, Karkat said.  It had been when Gamzee messaged him cheerful “WhAt’S uP?”-s for the gazillionth night in a row without a response.  It had been when Gamzee promised to pray for him when he snapped part of his ankle apart that one time, and still did it every motherfucking evening even after Karkat mocked him and all he stood for most, most viciously.  (“Yeah, that sounds like you, Vantas,” said Jade.  “I’m not too surprised.”) 

Only, you know, brother, Gamzee was pretty motherfucking surprised enough for the both of them.  He’d always thought Karkat had decided to want him when he overdosed really bad a few sweeps back. When it’d looked like he might not come back from the sopor, and if he did enough of his brain would’ve rotted to sparking mush that a motherfucker’d barely know him.  Karkat had grabbed on to him, then, and dragged him back.  Gamzee wouldn’t forget that shit, but he’d always wondered if Karkat would’ve chosen to solidify shit with him otherwise.  Maybe not, he’d thought.  Maybe his dumbass self just got lucky.  How do you bring that kinda hurt up, to a moirail who’d done so much good by you?  

But Karkat told Jade, “I realized he actually wanted to be _there_.”  And that was before the overdose, brother.  Somehow.  Maybe Gamzee’d been chosen before Karkat even let him know it?  Made him sort of look at shit differently – at the way Karkat got him to buy a hoodie from a human mall they stopped at, ‘cause even if he’d sopor-blurred all his nerves off he could still get himself fucking sick in that Earth winter.  At the way Equius said, “Highblood,” all eagerly groveling, trying to provoke a sneer, too, maybe.

Huh.  It was something of a fucking change, to feel so chosen.

And then, they were there.  Jade had been right about John’s dad-lusus – he recognized her even after so many silent motherfucking sweeps.  Still had those toys out in the yard like she’d thought, too…  Turned out Karkat owed her some mysterious earth currency for that, after making a bet. 

Gamzee couldn’t look too long at the wobbly wiggler drawings John’s dad-lusus had stuck on his fridge, though.  Too close to dreaming, brother.  That frozen box – Gamzee was almost positive it was that _same motherfucking box_ he’d been rattling around in, middle of some other, terrifying life.  Enough to melt his thinkpan, if the sopor didn’t do a good enough job of that shit already.

John’s respite block was exactly as he must have left it, too – maybe less dust.  There was a chest of prank shit, like what a most mirthful priest might’ve collected back on Alternia, and a sort of human clown smiling down from frame after frame on the walls.  Something crackled in Gamzee’s head, growling that he should get his motherfucking rage on at something to do with that, at some kinda singing blasphemy from his other life…  But he didn’t.  Mostly he just thought John had been blessed to have a lusus-dad that wanted him so badly.  That kept him close, even when he wasn’t around to keep.  What would it be like, growing up with a family like that? 

They ate cake; they chatted with John’s dad-lusus about fancy inventor articles Jade had published.  How proud he was of her, and of all John’s other friends he didn’t even rightly know.  Then, he drove them out to the plot of rolling, peaceful dirt where humans planted their dead.  Buried them like seeds, brother, as if they could grow into something laughing and new. 

John’s dad-lusus paid his respects out by the cold, milky-grey stone that the grave-people’d given his son – why he’d decided not to have John’s body preserved in the family home, Jade wasn’t quite sure.  Then he said, “You kids let me know when it’s time to go home,” and went to wait in the car with a copy of _Fatherhood Monthly._   Lots of shaving cream in that motherfucking magazine, looked like.  Lots of dapper hats, too.

Jade put a little joy buzzer and some joke books down on John’s plot of earth – other humans had flowers or letters in moldy rain-soaked envelopes.  She turned back to Aradia with one of her heavy eyebrows raised, like, “Now what?”

Gamzee shifted in his damp enormous clown shoes, and Karkat cleared his throat sort of messily.  He’d complained to Gamzee on the way over, real low and secret, that they should’ve worked out some dead guy presents to bring, too.  They all checked around to make sure the graveyard was empty – couldn’t have some stray humans seeing what was gonna happen next and freaking the fuck out.   

“I’ve never reached for a human this way before,” said Aradia.  She rubbed her hands together and smoothed the fluffy tangles of her hair, tossing them over her shoulders like a cape.  The start of her magic act, only one of its kind on that whole Earth. 

“Careful,” said Karkat.  “If he doesn’t wanna come out, don’t make him.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Aradia, and then she reached deep into her wine-dark burgundy blood for all the spirits swimming there. 

If anything, the human cemetery had almost _too much_ to say.  One second it was motherfucking still, a sprawl of stones and statues of humans with folded, useless feathery wings, and then all the people melting into the satin of their coffins stretched free.  They smeared the air with dozens of rattling, creaking voices; they clutched at Aradia’s outstretched fingers, at her hair.  At the promises in her blood.  Aradia greeted them very politely.  She asked if a boy named John Egbert hung out around there, and whether he’d like to say hi to his friend Jade. 

(Jade, meanwhile, clutched at Gamzee’s motherfucking arm for a second.  She asked if she was dreaming and he said probably not, not so’s _he_ could tell.  Her knees seemed about ready to buckle, but she kept on standing.)

When John stepped out of his dirt, he looked older than in the pictures back around his dad-lusus’s hive.  Older than when he’d woken up dead with his brains splattered out across the wall of his bedroom, soaking into his fluffy _Ghostbusters_ comforter.  His hair was messy and ethereal, now, colorless and ruffled up like he’d just been sleeping on a sopor-less human “bed.”  (Gamzee’d learned all about those, lately.  See, he even knew what “comforters” were, now!)  John was wearing some grave dirt-smudgy human suit, too, and he fiddled with the tie like it was a Legislacerator noose all out to strangle a motherfucker.  Jade gagged on a little air, seeing him.  She dropped Gamzee’s arm and took a half-step forward.

“Thanks for the joke book,” John said.   He sounded a little shy, maybe.  A little sorry, though really _too many_ motherfuckers got culled by the Condesce to feel embarrassed of it for long.  His voice seemed naturally bouncy and warm.  A pogostick-kinda voice.  “And for buying gushers on my birthday every year.”

That was when Jade burst into tears and stumbled forward into a hug.  Gamzee could tell it was taking all Aradia’s motherfucking energy to keep John solid enough to hug her back, but – just for a moment, there – he did.     


	9. Okay, but how long has Equius even been building soul-bots?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! Soooo, welcome to chapter 9!!! I hope you have fun with the chapter, if you read it -- as always~ :D Happy... daylight savings?? I feel like I'm posting this pretty late in the day, but I didn't mean to, ahhhh. 
> 
> I ALSO feel like I should have something else to put here? Idk. Maybe this chapter is kinda about healing. I really enjoyed describing Aradia and the ghosts!!
> 
> Have a wonderful week. :)

 Keeping John Egbert’s spirit solid probably felt like lifting something ridiculously motherfucking heavy to Aradia, but she kept her act going longer than Gamzee’d known any troll could.  Given this was a world she’d spent only a handful of hours rattling around on; given she would giggle later that human souls were slippery, quick things, fast and warm like the pounding of mammalian hearts.  Maybe Aradia was the first troll alive to raise the human dead.  Felt more than possible, to Gamzee at least.

Other human souls slid longingly back to their dirt – some stretched to kiss Aradia’s fingertips, whispering to her like she was some kinda deathly Empress.  Gamzee had never seen so many detached, yearning dead things in one place before.  He thought a little about the raging ghostly army Aradia had sent after Vriska when those spidery mind tricks of hers paralyzed Tavros.  Maybe they had looked sort of watery and half-desperate like these guys – or even worse, now that he thought about it.  Mourning their own motherfucking snapped-up lives, mourning Vriska’s lusus’s mandibles.  Or whatever the fuck spiders had?  Gamzee didn’t rightly know. 

The Heir of Breath and the Witch of Space talked in low voices, and they wandered together past the stained tombstones and over to sit at the foot of one of those stone humans with flightless carved wings.  Gamzee didn’t listen to what they had to say to each other, but he saw the sharp tears on Jade’s cheeks catch in the sunlight without honestly meaning to.  He saw the way she reached for John’s arm, knowing her fingers might fade right through - knowing he was gonna slip away again, truly. Any minute now. Gamzee saw the way John tipped up Jade’s chin with mischief in his spectral eye.  Hoping he could still make her laugh, despite everything.     

“John says he already knew why we’re here,” Jade told them, when Aradia couldn’t keep the channels open anymore.  When her blood was burning, going to steam, and she could probably really go for one of those psychic-enhancing sodas trolls sold back on Alternia.  “And he said he’s in, if he can be.”

“Oh, he’ll  _have_  to be,” said Karkat, and they got the fuck out of that place, with its sleeping dead.  A statue with her delicate wrist all cut off and ragged just before the motherfucking hand seemed to point their way out.  She had a lonely sort of smile on, too.  Statues could look so motherfucking  _knowing_ , couldn’t they?  Art was really something, divinely inspired carnival frenzy or no.  Gamzee stood for a second grinning up at that statue until Karkat hissed at him to get a move on.

They drove back to John’s old house with his dad-lusus.  They played a game of something called Earth “Parcheesi,” and were appropriately impressed by a bunch of slick dad hats.  John’s dad-lusus clapped Jade on the back as they left, and her expression was motherfucking unreadable when he said he’d be missing her.  She stopped and hugged him, again, though.

Back in their hive-ship, Terezi showed everybody the best of Dave Strider’s cryptic internet comics – what the actual Messiahs-loving fuck they meant, Gamzee couldn’t have told you – and talked about how hard that guy was to get an actual read on.  She’d been camped out in front of her screens for a long fucking time, but whenever she thought she could pin him somewhere, pinned long enough to potentially send a team down…  Gone.  She had seen some probably-Alternian agents, though –  _after_  Dave had ripped them up with a broken blade and left their cupcake-mix warehouse burning, or something.  He was wanted by a lot of different Earth governments, Dave, and he had flipped Terezi off in the best photo-still she’d managed to get of him so far.  Nobody said anything about it, but Gamzee thought maybe she seemed too enthusiastic not to be kind of into the whole thing.  A little annoyed, too, in a refreshing and cackle-y sort of way.

Yeah, so there was Dave and his arcane internet comics, and there were  _also_  Equius and Aradia whispering back and forth about a suggestion he had for keeping John’s soul tied to the living world.  He’d stalked over to her nice and slow, and poised the ideas with his dark, oily eyebrows arched all beseechingly and shit.  An aristocrat trying real fucking hard not to look down his nose at a peasant who didn’t have to be a peasant anymore.  Deciding if he should bow; smoothing his hair with a dripping palm.  Honestly, Gamzee thought it meant something that Equius was offering Aradia one of his leering smiles, now, full of that wet darkness between his teeth.  Aradia looked quizzical at first, and then she bunched her fists up in her skirt, scowling so darkly Gamzee could almost feel the psychic energy seeping off her like a burning wind.  She sighed deep enough that Karkat could probably hear it from across the motherfucking room.

“This makes me so uncomfortable I can’t even believe I’m suggesting it,” Aradia announced.  “But because it’s true – what Equius actually  _did_  with this invention happened in another life – it’s almost nice to think we can take that  _horrible mistake_  and maybe make something good for John Egbert’s ghost out of it.”

“Thank you,” Equius said.  “I understand your revulsion, believe me.  When I began construction I just thought it might be…  Prudent.”

“Okay.  Someone  _has_  to tell me what’s going on,” Jade said.  “John’s one of my  _best friends_.  You’re talking about…  About his soul?”

“Yeah.”  Aradia sighed.  “Let’s see what  _you_  think of all this.”  She pulled Jade away from Terezi’s post at the helm and down the hall to the mysterious, oil-flecked workshop that was Equius’s respite block.  Always smelled like sweat and metal, there; always faint whirring sounds slithering out from underneath the motherfucking door.  Based on the way they were whispering together, it sounded like the plan to come would involve the tablet thingy that had temporarily stuck all their shoes to the floor, that one time, (“Oh no!  That was so dumb!” said Jade, on the matter) and glued Tavros’s tongue to the roof of his mouth until Aradia managed to convince it that was kind of an asshole move.  The ghost tablet, from that ruined moon the Alternian Empire had left in its wake, and something pretty motherfucking unexpected Equius had put together locked up tight in his respite block.  Unexpected to  _Gamzee_ , at least. 

Equius himself trotted awkwardly after Jade and Aradia, looking unsure what all to do with his blocky, rough-worn hands.  He gestured for Gamzee to follow, though – a little twitch of his neck, without a lot of bows and “Highblood”-s or fumbling faux-respect at all.  So Gamzee shuffled after him, thinking a little about how Equius had kissed him when he was raw and raging and half beyond his own control.  Thinking about how Equius had secrets left over from their other lives, too, shit he probably wouldn’t want Gamzee to know.  There he’d been, with Nepeta’s blood ground into his clubs like a new coat of paint.  There he’d been, with something like Equius’s blood – something dark enough to almost be –

Damn. 

It seemed Equius had built them all motherfucking metal skins.  One for each of the Red Team, hanging on hooks along the wall of his respite block, staring out with crystalline electric eyes.  Dim, but probably meant to glow faintly in the colors of their blood.  Crackle with laughter; smolder with hurt.  It reminded Gamzee a little of the human statues with their blanked-out stares, all those maned purrbeasts in London, all those demure and smirking angels in the cemetery where John Egbert was sleeping.  Equius had hammered the metal out all tenderly, to match the contours of his friends’ skulls – cheekbones and jaws, all that shit, about as close to life as Gamzee thought steel could get.  Equius had estimated everybody’s measurements, recreating them as near to truth as he could scrape.   Gamzee didn't even wanna think about how many slabs of metal he'd probably had to scrap, after busting through them accidentally with his enormous strength.  

Maybe it was cruel, but Gamzee’s first thought seeing himself there – his own nose, his own huge clown feet, his own hanging arms – was that it probably meant something that Equius hadn’t taken this chance to make him into a more terrifying, aristocratic highblood.  He could have erased all signs of sopor and misuse, here.  Sweeps slumped on a grey beach, drinking soda and staring out at a horizon that only got blurrier and blurrier, only farther and farther away.  But he hadn’t, despite all the times Equius had put him down for everything he was when they were wigglers.  Gamzee’s metal skin looked so like Gamzee himself that it almost burned.  It wasn’t even dressed all nice, the way Equius tried to get Gamzee fancied up sometimes.  It had brand-new versions of Gamzee’s juggling clubs strapped to its back, though, and the laces on its huge floppy clown shoes tied very neatly.

If Gamzee had been Karkat’s first choice – if Karkat had wanted him as he was, even before he nearly lost himself to the slime, despite every fucking thing screaming he probably hadn’t – maybe it wasn’t so crazy to think Equius had wanted him too.  Maybe.  Gamzee still felt it churning in him, deep, like a pie gone sour, about to bring on a bad kinda spinning.  Felt like he couldn’t have been enough, or couldn’t have fit  _right_ ; felt like he probably hadn’t had a fucking idea what most of his friends were talking about back then.  But after the way Karkat had nodded over to him knowingly, had laughed with Jade about noticing how loyal he was, how gentle he could be…  After knowing Karkat might hurry him along with the group just because it would’ve hurt to lose him whether they were fated moirails or not… 

Equius caught Gamzee staring across the row of metal skins, from Karkat’s carefully shaped scowl to the red polish painted over Terezi’s claws.  Must’ve gotten the wrong idea about his expression, ‘cause he said, “It was only for emergencies, you understand, Highblood.  Gamzee.” 

“No, no,” Gamzee offered.  He laughed a little, like stumbling over his own motherfucking feet.  He  _would_  probably always wonder how Equius had gotten so much of all their blood, dangling in liquid gemstone plastic bags and hanging by their hollow skins, but that was okay.  Purple blood wasn’t exactly the easiest fucking thing to buy from lower on the hemospectrum, but there it was.  Sitting pretty.  Maybe Equius’d forked over some serious money for it; maybe he’d drawn it out of Gamzee’s own veins and he’d been sleeping too deep to know it.  “I get it, brother.  For one of us to wear, if we got culled, right?”

“That’s…  A little creepy,” Jade confessed.  “And  _I_  have my stuffed Grandpa hanging around at home.  But it’s also kinda sweet.  Sort of like the idea of my Grandpa watching out for me?  He was an interesting guy.  You might’ve liked him, Aradia!”

Aradia murmured that she was sure she would’ve liked an adventurous, deadly man like Grandpa Harley.  Yes. 

And okay – the metal skins were sweet enough  _now_ , and she could see how building them had come from a hopeful place.  She didn’t look too long at her metal self, though, and when she did glance over it was with a frustration like boiling water in a pot.  Close to frothing over, except Gamzee didn’t think she was gonna let it.  She said there was another time when she’d woken up in a body like that, though, and hadn’t been herself anymore.  A time when Equius had made her into a stranger and kissed her so he could taste his own cold blue blood in her breath, in the strength of her touch.  She had been spun like a doll, dipped like a love interest on one of Karkat’s romcom DVD covers, so hair that was hers and wasn’t hers at the same time brushed the floor of Equius’s lab.

Aradia wasn’t interested in wearing a metal skin.  She thought it was a good step that Equius had stored some of her own burgundy blood for her, anyway.  Here, in  _this_ broken world.  Didn’t make what Other Equius did better right away, but it proved once again that she was dealing with someone else.  Good to know, that part.

“I offered the robotic bodies for the Heir of Breath,” Equius explained.  “Not intending to unnerve anyone.  I imagine we could modify one of the existing skins for him, or I could begin constructing something from scratch…  It would be easier if I had my complete laboratory here, of course, and I am not certain how well the organs I built will function with human blood.  Perhaps Karkat’s mutant fluids would be closest…?”    

Jade said, “Um, maybe?” but Aradia wasn’t having any of that noise.  She said that was exactly why the fancy alien ghost tablet was involved at all, in how she’d been explaining the thing to Jade.  Because she  _knew_  what it was like to wake up motherfucking changed.  Pumping blood that wasn’t her own.  Said John Egbert deserved a little motherfucking autonomy.  If they crammed him into a metal shell, Equius would be the one in control again.  Or her, or Jade, or a horrible combination of the three of them.  But if they learned the spells to seal John’s soul to the robot body, he could unseal himself at will.  Seal himself to some other fucking thing, if he wanted.  Detached and fluid, like breath itself, moving from one form to another, in control of his own ghost.  Summoned by Aradia but then just hanging out. 

Gotta love weird alien spells.

“I  _knew_  there was a reason to translate every set of cryptic ancient runes you find,” Aradia chirped.  “Sollux doesn’t agree, but I’m not saying you have to speak the spells and run the programs, right?  Just…  See if it’ll be useful.”

“This  _is_  useful,” Jade said.  She sounded swimmy and far away, like part of her was still down in the cemetery with John.  Letting a friend nudge her arm and go,  _“Eh?  Eh?”_   Letting a friend scrub her tears away for the first time in what might have been sweeps.   She made a couple jokes about something called a human  _Fullmetal Alchemist_ that Gamzee didn’t get, and then, “Maybe I could help pick clothes for John’s – uh…  John’s robot suit?  I could help with the design.  And building, too, if you don’t mind, Equius.”

“Of course not, Dr. Harley,” said Equius.  He looked a little relieved, maybe ‘cause they weren’t talking about something his other self had gotten up to, before.  Making his romantic partner – matesprit, in that case? – into something more like what he thought he wanted.  Sort of the way Gamzee’d always been afraid Equius would wanna do to him, except…  Except he  _hadn’t_ , building that new metal body.  Except maybe Equius had grown up some, since however they’d all been when they played the true universe’s game.  Except maybe that couldn’t have been helped.  Sweeps had passed, after all, and they’d learned to carry fucked up memories around like souvenirs, like stringy shit stuck between their fangs that just wouldn’t come out.  

Everybody got busy pretty soon after that, except Gamzee wasn’t sure what he should get all busy with, exactly.  Aradia told Tavros about Rose Lalonde and her wizard/tentacle god books, and they composed a letter for her…  Sneaking in hints about knowing all kinds of shit they weren’t supposed to know, sure, but also just fangirling over the sorcerer catacombs and moth woman romance.  Aradia said she couldn’t wait for the next book to come out, and she  _also_  said one of the characters in particular made her think of a good friend of hers from way back home.  Slipped Kanaya’s name a couple times.  Hoped Rose would think about something called “Derse” the way she’d written it, all sweet-poison smoke and evening dark spires sharp and cruel as a Subjugglator’s throwing knives for some kinda spinning-wheel evisceration splatter show.  Think about what she’d remembered enough to mourn, remembered enough to warp into some motherfucking prose.  She  _had_  to care, still, to close her eyes so tightly.

Equius and Jade got to work choosing materials and drawing schematics to figure out John’s new skin, and Karkat and Terezi were back at the helm computers laughing over Dave Strider’s arrest reports.  The guy really did love putting on a show – Terezi seemed especially giddy reading about the time he’d flown away from a crime scene on a shitty, somehow pixel-y skateboard.  Waving at baffled cops beneath him, expression never flinching.  Straight-faced and staring, the drama all around reflected in his motherfucking shades.  A broken sword clenched shaking in his fist. 

“He’s made a lot of messes, this coolkid,” Terezi snickered, “And his homemade ‘Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff’ movie is both genius and the worst thing I’ve ever smelled in my life.  Like all the most ridiculous parts of the internet ate too much of Gamzee’s old pie and puked all over the screen.”

“We are  _not_  watching it,” said Karkat.

“Oh, but maybe there’s a clue I missed!” Terezi crowed.  “I dunno, I think we might have to.”

Gamzee lingered around, trying to be helpful – bouncing from workplace to project like a rubber ball bomb ambling along before everything turned to fire and screaming and confetti.  Maybe he could’ve helped carry materials and shit for Equius and Jade; maybe he could’ve helped Tavros and Aradia talk through what all might say _“This is interesting, please think about it really motherfucking hard,”_  to Rose Lalonde; maybe he could’ve watched the “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff” movie with Karkat and Terezi.  But he ended up going to practice juggling by himself for a little while.  Remembering what he was, and what he’d wanted to be before he’d thought too hard about being anything at all.  A clown.

Probably it would’ve made more sense for Gamzee to practice combat vs. Equius’s battle robots again, or work on talking fluidly about human shit, or something like that.  Start scheming what all he could do to heal his Mirthful Church, when the time came to start on that righteous and terrifying journey.  Probably.  But as soon as he held those clubs in his hands, standing in front of the horde of beat-up metal robot motherfuckers, all he wanted to do was see them fly.  Like the moons during Alternia’s impossible Juggling Eclipse.  Like innocent thoughts, flashes of color crossing each other in the sky.  Bubbles in a can of soda; waves on an empty beach.

Gamzee juggled, mixing up his act a little here and there.  But nothing too harshwhimsical, nothing too raging – it was the kind of lopsided, rambling clown dance he might’ve used in a show on some very different Alternia.  The kind of shit only really Karkat had watched, before, Karkat and the quiet night around his hive.  Whatever motherfuckers might’ve passed by his lonely oceanside and seen, but still decided not to kill him for whatever miraculous fucking reason.  

Honestly, Gamzee hadn’t been so completely by himself in what felt like a long time.  He let his mind trickle off to someplace full of imagined carnival music and slow, patient breathing.  Nothing but the sway of air and clubs, with no hilarious brain-splattering mania to go along with them. 

The juggling pins rose and fell, rose and fell, and after a while Gamzee realized Equius was in there watching him.  He was a smear of wet darkness in the doorway; he was hard to read behind those shattered glasses he wore.

When Gamzee quit spinning and his juggling clubs clattered to the floor like the crack of unsuspecting bones, Equius said, “No need to stop for me.”

“What’s up, brother?” Gamzee tried.  His voice was swaying and soft, to his own ears, but Equius shook his head, pulling away like a horse rearing to shake some poor motherfucker off their back.          

“Nothing,” Equius said.  “I just wanted to tell you – about Aradia, and her other robotic body, I wouldn’t –”

Worlds turned out new; mistakes got themselves made.  Gamzee wondered again whether the blood-paint staining his fingers on that other life’s meteor had been dark and deep-current cold enough to be Equius’s own.  He wondered if the nervous pit his stomach became thinking on it would ever fill, and why exactly Equius wanted him to know he wouldn’t offer such a fucked up wanting to Aradia, here, in the world that was their only truth.  Gamzee already knew he wouldn’t do that shit, now that he’d leaned back to look at it right.  The Equius with him right then had only ever wanted to save everybody’s asses, out in that haunted stranger’s space.  There were plenty of worse motherfucking things to want.  Worse reasons to harvest up motherfuckers’ blood.

So Gamzee said all that, and Equius made as if to go.  Fumbling a little bow, smiling like an involuntary twitch.  Smiling like he smelled something bad.  Equius told Gamzee to pick up his clubs, get back to whatever the fuck he’d been doing.

Maybe it was because Gamzee’s mind was still caught up in the ebb and flow of the juggling pins, and maybe it was because he’d seen the way Equius wanted him to keep his own lopsided, stumbling self, and maybe it was because Karkat had assumed he knew how  _wanted_  he could be or otherwise he might’ve had some fucking things to say about it.  But whatever the reason, Gamzee asked if Equius remembered sparring with him, and how they’d said maybe they would be doing all that again.

Equius said he remembered.  He curled his lip and added about how he’d thought maybe  _Gamzee_  had forgotten, though, and there was something hungry in his voice.  Gamzee wasn’t sure that kind of hunger had ever been directed towards him before, except maybe it had been – through gauzy layers of awkwardness and nobility’s entitlement, through sopor-haze.  Something they’d both had to grow into, like honest faith or most decent clown shoes.  Maybe something like what Gamzee offered Equius then couldn’t have happened in a different sort of world, where they died young or became gods as reality ended. 

By the time Gamzee shambled home to his and Karkat’s respite block, he had instigated kisses and taken challenges and refused to give orders in such a coarse and laughing voice that Equius shivered down to his bones.  Karkat squeezed his arm, pulling him inside with a conspiratorial smile; Karkat asked if he’d filled a second quadrant.  Maybe something pitch; maybe something  _recently_.  (Not nearly as fancy as theirs together, of course, as Karkat had been first.  But still.) 

Gamzee said he thought maybe he had.  He’d definitely gotten Equius pinned a couple times there, brother, and taught him what all clown paint tasted like if you know what he meant.  But until he heard the words ground past Equius’s own chilly fangs it was hard to know for sure.

Karkat said, “Aw,” in a teasing, fond kinda voice.  He dragged Gamzee down next to their recuperacoon to talk all that shit out, starting from the beginning.  Really wanted to hear it, felt like.  Really wanted to know what there was to be knowing.  So Gamzee flopped over with his head in Karkat’s lap, and let his moirail pick scraps of metal and old sleeping-sopor out of his curls as he talked.  His voice felt like the sway of juggling clubs, by the end of it all, sing-song and easy as breathing.  Shifting his feet in gray sand, watching his clubs tumble against the poisoned sugary blur of Alternia’s sky.

Karkat  _also_  let Gamzee know exactly how terrible the “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff” movie was before they went to sleep. That shit sounded worse than Gamzee’d expected, believe it or not.     


	10. Could this guy be the saddest fucking human in all Texas?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy day-after-St-Patrick’s-Day!!! :O And also, Sunday. Welcome to chapter 10!!! I hope you enjoy it, if you read, and I’m sorry as always for any and all mistakes I made. I mean well, and I hope I did okay with this one.  
> A couple things, real quick:  
> 1\. I’ve been referring to this in my head as the “Dirk Strider chapter.” I knew I wanted to do a Dirk chapter from the beginning, and that’s why he’s always been tagged… But, warning: I talk about Dave’s puppet-filled canon childhood? That means roof strifing and neglect come up here, so… Please be safe, if you think reading about this might hurt you!!!  
> 2\. This interpretation of Dirk was definitely being influenced by Lil Cal in a similar way to Gamzee when he raised Dave the way he did, also. So… Dang it, Cal. “Possession” features in this chapter, too, although Dirk doesn’t absolve himself from guilt. I thought Gamzee might offer an interesting perspective on that idea? 
> 
> I really appreciate you sticking with the story all the way to chapter 10, wow. :’) Only three more chapters left, and a lot’s gonna happen in them~~~ Have a wonderful week!! Thank you so much!!!

By the time the next Earth day rolled around, sticky with sopor and full of grinding, sharp-metal sounds from the workshop in Equius’s respite block, Rose Lalonde had responded to their fan letter thing.  She was grateful, she said, and Gamzee thought her hesitant, hinting questions leaked fear through their motherfucking computer screen.  She might have suspected something already, and gone looking for the message?  Wanting answers, brother, though maybe dreading anything real at the same time.

Maybe it would’ve been easier if Kanaya was some other human girl Aradia’d been thinking on; maybe it would’ve hurt less if fucking aliens couldn’t just turn up and confirm Rose had truly lost the whole universe she felt missing inside her.  Missing like the soggy, pounding hollowness where a motherfucker’s ribcage used to be, maybe, seconds before a Subjugglator strung those splintered bones into the lace of their pretty new acrobat get-up.  Some shit like that.  Seconds before the warm empty of death came, and the Dark Carnival beyond it.

So Aradia would be replying to Rose, drawing her in as close as she could get her, but just as soon as she was done with whatever the fuck kind of clinging, ancient magic she was up to in Equius’s lab.  Lots of stifled half-screams in the meantime, brother.  Lots of Jade excusing herself as politely as possible ‘cause she’d been learning a little too much about what all kinds of mechanical troll guts Equius was used to building.  From what Gamzee gathered, human anatomy was really something new.  Lots of unguarded, squishy organs that couldn’t squirm into something poisonous or weaponized if they got motherfucking threatened.

Kinda put humans like Jade – chewing out the actual Condesce, or thinking she fucking was anyway – and Dave Strider, Alternian Baked-Goods Factory Destroyer, in a different context.  Little warmblooded star monkeys staring down something so intergalactically terrifying and merciless like _“What the fuck else are we supposed to do?”_   Gamzee told Jade some of that, and she clapped him on the back and said he was sweet.  Asked if he’d like a clown-themed experimental teleporter gun, and he said that sounded wicked as the throat-ripping halls of righteous subjugglation to come.  Jade said, “Um, no comment to the last part, about the throats...  I’m gonna take the rest as a yes, though.”

Speaking of the human Dave Strider, Terezi also had an ultimatum to make that morning.  And that was, she was motherfucking sick of guarding her screens.  She wanted to smell Earth all up close and personal, and probably lick some of it, too.  Specifically, she wanted to lick the part of Earth called Texas, where the sky was huge and dusty and Dave Strider had grown up bleeding.

See, Terezi had found some old videos of Dave hiding in an out-of-service Alternian satellite, and maybe too many of those recordings showed the guy sparring with his lusus-human-guardian-guy on the roof of their communal hive stem.  She said it’d reminded her of Vriska and her lusus, watching that shit.  A relationship with so much fear and bravado, so many violent expectations.  Busted lips, bruised fists, snapped ankles.  A lot of puppets, too.  Actually, more puppets than Vriska and her lusus had ever kept around, but the fact that the puppets were part of the bleeding, part of the pain, didn’t surprise Gamzee too much.  Puppets were involved in a lot of Subjugglators’ deadliest acts.  They were vessels, and who the fuck knew what kind of prayers moved their strings until the show began?  

Dave had so many reasons to fight the way he did, Terezi said.  He could fight for his friends – his support and purpose, before they crumbled.  He could fight for his stunted, SBURB-less universe, or his spinning blue planet Her Imperious Condescension had definitely been planning to drown.  Terezi wanted to go check in on one of those reasons.  She wanted to see Dave’s communal hive stem, and she wanted to see what the fuck his lusus knew. 

Jade said, “I never met Mr. Strider.  Dave’s brother…  I guess he used to do a rap act, with those puppets you mentioned?”  She said she’d never known most of the rotten stuff, not really, when she and Dave were talking.  Not until later.  She said the videos Terezi found were hard to watch.  Made her stomach turn a whole motherfucking tumbling routine.  No food in the motherfucking fridge, and there’s Dave getting shoved down the stairs.  Swiping blood off his mouth, wracking his brain for some kind of witty one-liner that could make his brother proud enough to back down for a while. 

Jade said she’d come talk to Dave’s brother-lusus, too, and she and Terezi both kind of decided they’d take Gamzee for backup and leave Tavros and Karkat in charge of the ship.  In charge of making sure Aradia and Equius didn’t explode everything, too, with whatever combo technology/alien magic shit they were cooking up. 

 “We’re _also_ stopping for Earth ice cream while I’m off this fucking ship,” Terezi declared.  “And maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll pick up Dave’s trail again.  I think he knows there’s somebody after him – he left me some rude messages, actually, and if they weren’t so funny I’d almost be pissed.”

And that was how come Gamzee wound up laughing with his slurry wet mammalian voice again, hugging Karkat goodbye and getting shoved off like “Yeah, yeah.  Leave me with the fucking creepy ghost-machine sounds, that’s great.”  Promising Tavros they’d hang out with their Fiduspawn together later; being shooed along by Terezi when he got distracted hearing about those same Fiduspawn and what all they’d been up to lately.  That was how he wound up heading down to Earth again, to whatever a Houston Texas was like. 

It was hotter there than anywhere else they’d been on the human’s planet so far, actually.  They flew over a sprawling brown world to get to the big city, past brittle cactus and dried-bone mountains and ranches full of beasts Tavros would’ve loved.  There were bulls around, brother, like his lusus far away.  Terezi had been right about the bite of dust in the air, and how huge the sky felt.  Like the grandest, bluest circus tent Gamzee’d ever fucking seen.  All the buildings seemed so stark and new after Earth London, bleached under Earth’s pale sun and strung with unlit neon letters Gamzee couldn’t read.  Aradia wasn’t there so he couldn’t have told you too much about any motherfucking ghosts, but they must’ve been around.  The land was old, of course, and wherever the fuck they landed smelled like human vehicle fuel and cooking meat. 

Gamzee thought they were gonna wander around a little and hunt down Dave’s old communal hive stem, but Terezi knew exactly where the place was.  He should’ve expected that kind of thing from a future Legislacerator, of course – Redglare’s cackling heir.  He told Terezi as much and she said yeah, he damn sure should have expected it.  Come on, Makara.  The building was smaller than it had seemed in those videos recorded all eerie stalker-like by an Alternian satellite – maybe it was ‘cause no little Earth wigglers were getting knocked around on the rooftop, gritting their teeth and shivering up onto their feet after getting tossed down again and again and again.  No adult human-lusus was moving silently forward, smooth as a Subjugglator, gesturing with a finger-slice across his motherfucking throat.  “Training time,” Terezi had called all that noise, and Gamzee thought, yeah, that made sense.  Training for a game that was never gonna get itself played, maybe.  Training to cull, the way so many wigglers on Alternia got themselves trained.

They climbed the gritty rust-metal steps up that communal hive stem, Terezi taking a jaunty lead and Jade glancing over her shoulder every now and then like she expected to see Dave every fucking place.  Dave slouched by his old neighbor’s potted plants, their flowers wilting and getting crinkly brown in the sun; Dave waving from across the street with headphones in and a cryptic, glitchy joke on his shirt that Gamzee wouldn’t get.  Like Jade was expecting to see a motherfucking ghost, except she’d seen John’s actual disembodied spirit not too long ago and hadn’t been nearly as freaked out.  The stairs creaked beneath them, bits of ruined metal flecking down onto the pavement below.  The communal hive stem held itself very still, like it was waiting for Dave to turn up, too. 

No Dave, of course.  No Dave around for sweeps, you know?  Jade was the one who knocked on his bro-lusus’s door, though, and the first thing Gamzee thought when the guy opened up was he didn’t look too much like he had in those sad old videos.  Not so muscular stick-straight and cold behind his shades, something of Equius’s regal breeding in the way he held himself.  Strutting over to scare Dave into fighting back.  Nah.  He was slouched a little, now, and very thin.  Not so stiff, either; not so sure, and he moved like his head was fucking killing him.  (Gamzee’d been through sopor withdrawal – he knew how that shit was.)  Mr. Strider’s shades reflected back Jade’s confused expression, and his lip twitched a little in recognition. 

“Dr. Harley,” said Dave Strider’s brother-lusus.  “No, _he’s_ not around.”  He paused, and for a second Gamzee thought he saw a puppet draped over his bony, shaking shoulder…  A puppet leering out with screaming-happy plastic blue eyes.  _Gamzee knew those eyes_.  He had seen them jammed into his own sockets, seen ‘em reflected back in the silvery smudges of those vent-walls in another life.  Seen them in too many dreams.  And then the puppet was gone, somehow, brother, gone so, so fast.  Gamzee had known there were puppets in that hive, puppets in the videos of Dave’s wigglerhood, but until those eyes were staring at him just fucking then he hadn’t known how it would be.  Hadn’t completely gotten who the fuck this _was_.  Mr. Strider added, “But you know that.”

Jade nodded.  She glanced past Mr. Strider into the room beyond.  It was dirty, with machine parts and crusty-grease takeout boxes crumpled on the floor.  Sticking to the carpet; squished between the stained couch cushions.  There were places where posters had clearly been torn from the walls and never replaced.  There were piles of those mysterious rainbow butt-puppets, except too many of them were missing their little heads, bleeding stuffing.  Slashed up, as if in a quiet rage neighbors might’ve shaken their fucking heads about. 

Jade asked if they could talk a little while, and Mr. Strider said sure.  Shrugged, tired.  He said to call him “Dirk;” he asked if they’d like a fucking soda, or a cup of water from the tap.  No one took anything he offered, not until after they’d been talking a little while.  Gamzee had seen broken things, before – broken honk-horns without any squeak left in them, broken battle practice robots Equius praised him for smashing through their motherfucking metal faces.  Broken trolls, when he’d been traveling with the Subjugglator worship circus that’d recruited him through conquered stars.  Dirk Strider seemed like a broken thing.

They sat on crusty furniture – probably gross with human shit Gamzee hadn’t heard of, Terezi would say later – in very awkward quiet for a while.  And then Dirk asked whether they were looking to take Dave away somewhere.  Beyond their world, to kill a tyrant.  Jade said yeah, they were, and Dirk said, “Right.”  Said he’d been hoping so.  Some of what his puppet – Lil Cal, the thing’s name was – told him was a hell of a lot worse than all that. 

Gamzee tried not to think about that motherfucking puppet, not any more than he had to.  He focused on the chilly anger in Jade’s eyes; focused on the twitching, bruised veins jutting all sickly in Dirk Strider’s skin.  Dirk knew all their names, already, and said something about it being strange to see Gamzee with both halves of his soul under one skin.  That would’ve been enough to shudder anyone’s bones, motherfucker.  But Gamzee reminded himself of how it wasn’t real to their world, not really.  Wasn’t the kinda thing he could fix, or be.  Whatever it was, it could not be his truth. 

Jade asked Dirk to explain whatever he could, and he wondered if she really wanted that.  She said, “ _Of course_ ,” in such a sure and sudden voice that Dirk said she maybe reminded him of somebody he knew.  Said it really quiet, too, like a confession at the blood-sticky feet of Alternia’s own most mirthful priests.   

Jade told Dirk not to explain that, yet.  She would _rather_ he explained what he knew about Dave, and the game.  What his fucking puppet had said, or something.  She sounded angry and protective, then – growled that she knew some of what Dave’s life had been like in that apartment – and Dirk nodded like he could more than understand.  Said he might as well be as useful as he could be, now that he got a chance.     

He said one day he’d woken up and realized whatever it was that’d had a grip on his motherfucking thinkpan – whatever it was that’d latched itself onto him like an actual slice of his own soul – had given up.  The mind in the puppet, brother.  The puppet realized that the game was never gonna be played, and that it wasn’t gonna be able to become its true self either, whatever the fuck that meant.  Wasn’t gonna be able to crack open and bring a murdermirth so raging and real it would change everything.  So it let go of Dirk Strider’s own puppet strings, left him glancing around at the life he’d built and asking who the fuck he was. 

Dirk said all that, and Terezi nodded like she’d known.  Shifted away from Gamzee a little, too.  A nervous tic.  Like she thought he might know something more; like she thought he might snap.

(Terezi caught herself, though, and she leaned in, again.  She brushed Gamzee’s arm with her own, warm and mammalian through her human-ification cloak.  Trusting.  Gamzee winced, but he didn’t mean to.  He thought Terezi probably knew that, too.)

  Dirk told them he knew what he’d become, to Dave.  What he’d done, feeling like it was right at the time.  He said Gamzee might understand a little of what that was like, what with all _he’d_ been, all _he’d_ done, but Gamzee just murmured that he couldn’t rightly say.  It had to do with the puppet.  It was a destiny they’d never live in this world, and it was a game some other versions of themselves were probably playing right that very fucking second.  It was choosing to listen to a voice that was almost your own but not, not _quite_ – Gamzee thought about his dreams and felt almost sopor-sick.  That’s when he took Dirk up on his offer for a soda, brother, and when he noticed how shadowed and sleepless Dirk’s eyes were underneath his shades as he passed it over.

So those puppet strings dropped, and by that point John was dead.  Getting cold and soggy in his patch of earth, all his brains washed out of his _Ghostbusters_ comforter.  Dead long enough that Dave had figured out how he got culled, figured out what all he had to up and do. 

By that point, Dave was changing, and when Dirk picked himself up enough to try and destroy his puppet for the first time Dave was already gone.  Ran away to one battle, and then another, growing up restless as one of the crows on the communal hive stem roof.  And now Dirk was still trying to destroy that damned thing, and Dave had never come back.

There were huge sword-scrapes in Dirk’s wall from when he’d chased down the puppet that was his own soul _(and Gamzee’s soul?  And what else, brother, what else?)_ and tried to gut it, but the thing lived somehow.  Dirk had almost burned the communal hive stem to the ground trying to char its stuffing-guts to drifting ash; he’d crammed it down the drain in clumpy water-soaked pieces.  But the puppet came back, and it came back, and Dirk had stopped trying to bring Dave home once he decided he just didn’t want to be found.

“I was a shit brother,” Dirk said.  “Dave was right to get out of here.”  Yeah, there it was, in the twitch of his lip – a broken thing.  Gamzee looked at the chalky, flaking sword-strikes in the wall, and the fresh bandages up Dirk’s arms.  He thought, yeah, it made sense.  Whatever that thing had to do with Dirk’s soul, it made a _lot_ of fucking sense.   Gamzee was lucky the puppet only visited him in his motherfucking sleep. 

Jade said, “Do you have any idea where Dave might be now?”

And Dirk said, “I know where he was last night.  Printed out an article about it, added it to the file.  Wanna see?”

Jade did, and when Terezi teased like it was maybe kind of creepy Dirk kept following his estranged brother’s journey across the world just like _she_ was – only not for an ancient aquatic horrorterror’s prophesy, but just because – he nodded again.  Said, “I tell myself it’s so I can help, if I need to.  So I can go where I need to be.  If…  Shit.  He asks, or something.  If I get things under control around here.”   

Gamzee thought he might have been watching the shadows of his apartment for uncanny, jerking puppet movements, right about then.  For sweet blue-plastic eyes.   

Dirk Strider’s file stretched back sweeps, and the thing was full of the kinda research Terezi’s hatching had pretty much set her up for, same way Gamzee’d been set up for grease paint and clown shoes.  There were newspaper cut-outs talking about Dave assassinating CEOs and organizing messy, cake-splattered worker uprisings; there were lists of dangerous, codenamed ingredients getting smuggled into Earth’s baked goods.  _Consume.  Submit.  Obey.  Stay asleep._   The Condesce’s whispers were working themselves into humanity’s very meat, nice and slow.

Dirk had printed copies of Dave’s threat letters he’d scrounged up through very illicit means, threat letters left behind on Alternian agents’ stiff and practical human worker-desks.  _“Looks like I’m awake,”_ one of those motherfucking letters read _.  “Your shit is wrecked.”_   Dirk said Dave had written that one the same way _he’d_ offered up a threat, in their other, useful lives.  Said it like this closeness wasn’t a coincidence to him.  Like he thought maybe it proved something motherfucking dear.  Maybe there was a version of himself his brother could have admired; maybe there was a lifetime where they healed.

So Dirk had pieces of buildings that’d gotten themselves burned and swatches of Alternian hair plucked from the rubble, and Dirk had Jade’s grandpa-lusus’s death notice thing and pages of drawings with him young and smiling, too.  Scribbled between rap lyrics and the butt-puppets’ prototype sketches, all that noise.  _Jake_.  Dirk tucked _those_ papers away practically as soon as Gamzee noticed them, anyway, and nobody asked any questions at all.

Of everything in the file, Terezi was most interested in where Dave Strider had been sighted most recently (someplace called Hong Kong?) and a document Dirk had intercepted full of suspects Dave thought were maybe loyal to the Batterwitch.  Terezi asked for that list, and Dirk handed it over, although maybe he didn’t want to.  Terezi said she knew he was harvesting that information in case Dave needed him – in case he got better.  She got it.  But they could bring everything they took back to the file, if Dave was cool with it.

Dirk said he wasn’t counting on it.  He also said, “I can’t imagine Dave not wanting to take on your Empress directly,” and his voice was just as low and gruff as it’d been at the beginning of their talk.  Still, Gamzee could imagine what a warm laugh he might’ve had once.  A self-conscious snicker, at least.  “Feels like just the chance he’s looking for, to me.”

“That’s what you’d think,” said Terezi.  “Gotta get the jump on that coolkid asshole first, though.  I think he’s taunting me in ‘Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff’ comics.”

Dirk’s pokerface cracked open into something almost like surprise, then, something almost like a smile, and it was raw and crooked and sadder than his controlled blankness by a motherfucking ton. 

In the end, Dirk said he didn’t have any messages to send along for Dave, when they found him.  _If_ they found him.  Looking at the list of Batterwitch-loyalist suspects would make it easier to tell where he might turn up, at least.

They left Dirk Strider to his refrigerator-swords and the blender with puppet snuff-film cotton stuck inside, and by the time they made it back to the street nobody felt much like getting ice cream, anymore.  Even Terezi. (They _did_ , though, because she didn’t know when she’d get to hang out off the motherfucking ship next.  She offered to bring Dirk some ice cream, too, in exchange for cooperating with their investigation.  He said not to worry about it.) 

Dirk would battle his demons again, a cycle of pointless guardianship that may never truly end.  When that possession got lifted, what all was the guy left with?  What would Gamzee have been left with, if it had been _him_ the puppet came for in this life?

Two weird motherfucking things happened as they got some Earth ice cream, though, shit that maybe wouldn’t have gone down the same way otherwise.  First thing was, Gamzee checked his messages and found a lot of updates from Tavros. 

Tavros started out, _“gAMZEE, pLEASE, hEAD BACK HERE, aS SOON AS YOU CAN,”_ with a little emoticon bull-horned surprised face.  _“rOSE REPLIED, aND ARADIA’S STILL BUSY.  nOT ANSWERING THE DOOR!”_

And then, _“wHY, aREN’T YOU ANSWERING?  dID SOMETHING HAPPEN_?”

_“rOSE’S MESSAGE, iSN’T RIGHT,,,  iT’S GLITCHY,,, sOMETIMES I CAN READ IT, sOMETIMES I CAN’T,”_

_aCTUALLY, i DON’T THINK SHE’S USING, a REAL ALPHABET,”_

_“tHE NOT-LETTERS ARE SPREADING!!!”_

_“uHHh, aLL OVER THE COMPUTER.”_

_“aRADIA’S, sTILL NOT AVAILABLE.  i THINK ROSE NEEDS HELP?  sHE SAYS SHE ASKED SOME QUESTIONS SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE???”_

_“???”_

_“i’M GOING MYSELF,”_

_“kARKAT’S REALLY MAD AT ME.”_

__Tavros had taken the other escape shuttle – Tavros was wearing the third human cloak, carrying warmth and the smell of mammal-blood like a shield.  Going to check in on a woman whose words wouldn’t keep solid on the motherfucking screen.  Slipping into otherworldly.  By himself, brother, with Karkat’s very creative insults rattling after him into space.

Jade thought they should maybe head over to wherever the fuck it was Rose was staying themselves, _right fucking then_ , and Terezi thought maybe they should try monitoring the situation from her mini-screens back in their own shuttle, checking out what all was already going down.  Coming in prepared as possible, given what she _couldn’t_ see where Rose was concerned.  Unfortunately for both (pretty damn important) plans, that was around when the second thing happened.  The second thing that may not have fucking started up at all if they’d let Terezi stretch her legs some before going to sit around Dirk Strider’s haunted hive stem. 

 They’d left the ice cream place – Gamzee with sugar-gooey fingers, typing up messages and messages to Tavros he wouldn’t actually get to send – when it happened.  There was a prickle in the air, like fear but colder.  Like hate, brewed ancient and patient.  They were in an alley by then, slipping through the city and out to the brown sprawling ground where they’d left their ship.  The ancient hurt and wanting was Alternian, Gamzee could tell it the way he knew when he was hungry, knew when he needed to crawl into some sopor and drift away.

The Batterwitch’s trolls didn’t look motherfucking Alternian, climbing out a restaurant’s back door and sidling in close.  But it was their _minds_ , brother.  Gamzee could feel their minds, muted and stumbling compared to some other motherfucker’s chucklevoodoos might’ve been, sure, but _there_.

They wore Crockercorp nametags with glittery crystal cupcake stickers on them, and the big lady with careful ringlets purred that they’d recognized Jade from her revolutionary science-something articles.  Had to talk to her, right?  Had to pick her brain some.  Maybe pick it out of the motherfucking concrete, even.  They circled nearer, and Gamzee thought about how many patrols had been sent out to Jade’s island, sent to cull her ass and wipe the slate clean.  Now that they were closer, he could taste these minds better, the shades of fear and hatred.  Or at least, he thought he fucking could.   Some midblood trolls, with a highblood commander.  A fish-girl, with her hair done pretty and human friends’ contact info in her Earth cellphone.  A fish-girl with a job to do, and an Empress to serve across motherfucking realities.  A fish-girl who maybe hadn’t seen her own real grey skin and pulsing ancient bioluminescent veins in actual sweeps.  She moved smoothly, unafraid, like they couldn’t even fucking run if they’d wanted to.  Like she knew the little alley-fight was already won.   

Gamzee reached into his strife specibus for those blood-battered clubs of his, but Terezi put a hand on his arm and whispered, “Wait until the people round that corner, over there.  Don’t want them getting one of those human ‘cops,’ mm?”  And then she smiled, somehow all fangs even through her earthly meat, and said, “ _Now_.”     


	11. Did YOU know Feferi’s lusus was such an otherworldly big deal?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again!! I hope the weekend's been fun for you so far~ Also, I hope this chapter is fun, ahahaha. I definitely wanted to give Tavros a chance to shine in this one! Mmm, I dunno if what he does here could possibly work in canon, but I had a lot of fun writing it? Hopefully it came out okay. :) 
> 
> Thank you very very much for reading!! Have a wonderful week.

 

Jade had never heard Gamzee’s murdermirth voice, before.  She said it reminded her of the motherfucker what had culled John way back when, all gibbering hilarity and divine knowing.  All twofold scream-laughing for the glory of those bloodiest messiahs, beating his brains into the blankets of that slime-less human bed.  She said it later, when Gamzee asked why her hands were still shaking.  Said it gently, and only after he kind of coaxed ‘cause he knew there was still some dripping quiet fear in her.

Gamzee snapped a spine, in that alley, snapped it into meat-slick puzzle pieces; Gamzee smiled so wide it fucking hurt when one of the midbloods gagged, “ _Subjugglator!_ ” like seeing him through his human skin meant pain and pain and pain.  Like he was an actual trained clown priest, and not a pan-rotted rebel who’d been all washed up on a grey beach and barely even able to attend worship circus.   

The guy tried to crush Gamzee’s skull before he reached into his holy chucklevoodoos, trying to get the drop on him before he stretched into their minds and planted the giggling terror there.  No need, brother.  Gamzee had clubs to swing, but no flashing, sputtering mind-magics to fuck them up with just then.  Gamzee had those sopor-numbed senses of his and a clown’s harshwhimsy keeping him nice and not-quite-there, too – he didn’t notice how blood-dripping and shivery he was, so it made sense the pain was a while to come.  Made sense he could give himself over to subjugglation.

The seadweller bakery motherfucker was strong.  The anchor she swung like a motherfucking mace was all gold, flecked with tiny shells and purple teardrop crystals from their homeworld left behind.  It was that thing that got Gamzee in the shoulder, right?  Reeling him in as the flesh ripped and he heard himself laughing from very far away.  Might’ve been fucking hard to bounce back without taking off a lot of his meat – except that Terezi was there, Terezi with her blade.  Except that Jade was there, too, with her mysterious science-guns.  Jade shot wavering green light, her lusus’s own world-defying light, and charred that seadweller’s arm into screaming flakes of non-flesh.  Bloodless and smoldering.  Her howled Alternian curses were gonna bring humans swarming like the faithful to that righteous Jestprophet’s mechanical show on old Alternia, true as anything, but she _also_ dropped the chain on her anchor real fast.

Gamzee ripped the thing free.  He splattered the seadweller’s guts all swimming-smooth violet along the bakery wall – an abstract cloudscape or some shit, with organ chunks like a storm coming.  Gamzee would’ve painted like all that so much more often, if he’d been running with the church he owed his dizzy blood to.  The Mirthful Priests didn’t give a fuck about ocean-born nobility, in the end, except as far as their Grand Highblood had sold them to the Condesce.  There was only the will of their gods; only the sparking divine fear; only the carnival to come.

Jade hissed something about them getting themselves up and seen; she hissed something about life-sentences in Earth jail and electric chairs and more trolls coming, trolls stirring in a factory base beneath the world a couple states over.  Be there sooner than they thought.  Batterwitch tech, and all.  Those other trolls’d clean up the mess and cull the loose ends like wigglers with no motherfucking lusus to want them.

So Jade teleported them away from that place, and her teleportation gun thing felt like shrinking and stretching both at once.  Snapping like a motherfucking rubber band.  Maybe their bones could’ve been teleported just that tiny, _tiny_ bit wrong and ended up outside their skin; maybe a slight miscalculation could’ve left their fucking eyes behind and squished into the pavement under somebody’s heel.  But none of that shit happened.  The teleportation guns worked fine. 

Jade hurtled them off back to their ship, and while she _did_ tell Gamzee as to how his voice reminded her of John getting culled, she told him as much while she was dressing his wounds all gentle.  She swabbed stinging antibacterial shit into him, scrubbed the sweet-smelling clown blood off onto a bunch of Equius’s towels.  (Gamzee didn’t think he’d mind too bad – he felt like Equius might be more annoyed to see him genuinely hurt.  He’d say something snide, but mostly ‘cause he was worried.  Maybe?) 

Jade revealed that Karkat had packed a bunch of extra clothes and clown paint before they left, too, so’s Gamzee could do his makeup again now without all the splattered gore.  She said not to mind her shaking hands, ‘cause she knew he wasn’t a threat to her, not in this timeline.  It was just he was _still laughing_ , and she knew he wasn’t gonna be able to turn that shit off easy.  Knew what his planet had done to him, and to so many others just the same.  So many others bound to that slaughter, to Her Imperious Condescension’s pain.

Gamzee’s laughter reminded Jade of why they _had_ to fight the Alternian Empire the way they did, and just a little of what was waiting for them back in the Empress’s space.  That was about the saddest motherfuckign thing Gamzee’d ever heard about his own laugh, but that’s not to say he didn’t understand.

They camped out in the mini-ship a little while, then, Terezi piloting them around slow and careful and waiting until she sensed some kinda _opening_ Gamzee didn’t understand.  An opening to get home safe; a lull in the Batterwitch loyalists’ surveillance.  They spoke in low voices, and tried to find visuals on Rose and Tavros anywhere across that whole planet…  Nothing for it, though.  It was as if they’d disappeared, dragged down into the squirming void where horrorterrors were always watching.  Gamzee felt sick thinking on what all might’ve happened to Tavros, even as he physically couldn’t stop laughing, sometimes – it was a laughter like choking, like wheezing, and it burned in his chest as he fumbled with Terezi’s computers.  Searching Tavros out, and finding abandoned hotel rooms, finding the Lalonde manor-hive very still and dark and full of fancy statue wizards and stiff-looking velvet pillows.  He knew Jade was terrified for what all might be happening to Rose even as they crept through that darkening, dusty human Texas, too.  He braided her hair away from her face, and tried to calm down as best he could through the rage-voice that’d got him good.

The murdermirth faded back, after a while, even without slime.  Gamzee was gonna have to tell Karkat – he might be kinda proud.  The murdermirth faded, and the pain came. 

Night fell before Gamzee got another message from Tavros, and this one was all it needed to be: _“gAMZEE, wHERE ARE YOU?  wE’RE SAFE,,,  wE JUST GOT BACK.”_

 __Gamzee wasn’t sure exactly what that fucking meant, but he started typing a message about how safe they were – (but sneaking around and waiting for the Batterwitch’s servants to let them through, or something) – when Tavros added, “ _rOSE REALLY LIKES MY FIDUSPAWN. }:D”_

 __When they finally made it back to their hive-ship in Earth’s orbit, Gamzee saw what a blessing they must’ve missed.  How much Tavros had managed to change things.  It was clear the ship was different from the second they climbed inside it, and that wasn’t _just_ John’s metallic robot-laughter rattling around after making some kinda human wordplay.  (Though that had to be a part of the change, not gonna lie.  John’s metal skin fit pretty okay, and the spell-runes carved along it to keep his soul stuck inside swam with a murky spectral energy.  Aradia said it’d taken him a while to get the hang of reciting his own spells, but he’d managed it with only a few painful mix-ups.  She was drained and proud and planning to duck away to her recuperacoon just as soon as she got her arm unstuck from the wall of Equius’s respite block lab.  Gamzee thought her smile felt wide and honest as a motherfucker’s pried-open insides.)

The changes in that ship-hive meant they were almost, _almost_ where all they’d needed to be coming to Earth in the first place.  The Red Team, almost doing what needed to get fucking done.  Gamzee could taste Rose’s fear on the air – it was _stronger_ , now, no longer quite so smothered by the tendrils of horrorterror-dark she’d knitted around herself.  It drifted off her in thoughtful waves.  Not that the eldritch influence was _gone_ , mind – just that it had loosened its coils a bit, enough for her heart to pump sort of on its own.  She was sitting on the floor at the helm of their ship, sitting with Tavros and Karkat and surrounded by mewling Fiduspawn-beasts.  Cradling one that looked like a see-through cat with tentacles.

Jade took a while to work up the nerve to head to the helm herself – she hung out with John, Aradia and their cryptic alien tablet in the meantime, explaining Texas and Dirk Strider and how dangerous getting ice cream had turned out to be. 

Rose smiled when she saw Gamzee, though.  She waved and offered, “Hello, Mr. Makara.  Forgive me for not recognizing you earlier?”

“Sure, sis,” said Gamzee.  “But what the fuck just happened?”

Rose’s eyes were a dusky lavender that made Gamzee think of powdery poisons and crushed flowers.   They were very tired, too; her words came out strangely, sometimes, as if under _slightly_ different circumstances she might have been speaking in an eldritch tongue.  Bound to a darkness beyond mortality, bound to speech no one who knew her could hope to understand.  But she looked to Tavros and said, “You _were_ excited to tell him.”  She held the cat-tentacle Fiduspawn very close, and the creature nuzzled up into her neck, leaving oozy trails along her skin. 

So Gamzee flopped down in the pile of pet battle-monsters Tavros never actually used for battle, and listened to what all he’d missed.  Karkat scooted over next to him and hissed about the bandages up his shoulder; Gamzee kissed his forehead all paint-smearing messily and said he’d get to that part soon, brother.  That shoulder ached something awful when Gamzee wrapped his arm around Karkat and held him close, listening, but Gamzee wouldn’t have done anything else just then.  Karkat must’ve noticed, though, because he told him not to be a fucking martyr and climbed around to the other side so’s Gamzee could use his good arm.  It hadn’t occurred to Gamzee what it would’ve meant if he’d died, mid-murdermode.  That Terezi and Jade could’ve been bringing Karkat his limp, carbonated blood-crackling corpse, right about then, or maybe not coming back themselves.  Disposed of whatever way the Alternian Empire knew how, on the motherfucking Earth.  But Karkat had known that shit the whole time, and Karkat pulled him in nice and tight.

Tavros talked, not meeting anyone’s eyes.  Brushing the knots out of one of his Fiduspawn’s twitching worm-like hair.  He talked about how freaked out he had been reading Rose’s responses.  How not-okay she had sounded – how a hundred thousand squirmy otherworld eyes had seemed to watch him through the inky dark of her words.  It wouldn’t have made sense, if he didn’t know what she was offering herself to. If he hadn’t heard about Derse, and the creatures beyond it waiting in the void; if he hadn’t read chunks of Rose’s novel himself to help Aradia start up some decent communications with her. 

“I thought if I waited for Aradia, or waited for you guys, we’d be too late,” Tavros said.  “And you know?  Uh, now I know we _would’ve_ been.”

Tavros had been wondering what all his point was, on their journey, truth be motherfucking told.  He hadn’t been especially useful finding the place to slip between universes, he said, like Terezi was…  And he hadn’t even been sent down to Earth at any point so far!  He wasn’t their resident berserker, hatched to subjugglate in the name of his twofold messiahs, or Aradia with her ghosts and honest confidence.  Not Karkat, who had drawn Jade close with memory and patience, and not Equius who had a row of metal skins just waiting to be worn.  Tavros had been feeling like a drifter, sort of, like his role was maybe to kinda back people up and scrub clean whatever messes he could.  It had been lonely, but he hadn’t known how the fuck to start talking about it without sounding like a whiny asshole.

And then, _then_ he was rolling a collapsible human wheelchair Terezi had prepared for him just in case up to Rose’s hotel in London – then he was finding the whole place crooked, caught between the real and unreal.  Waiters frozen with their trays half-spilled over the floor, staring baffled and unblinking down at their own hands; metal that seemed polished one second and then rusted.  Whole and then falling apart; real and then just a smear of nothingness in an ever-spreading dark.  Rose’s magic was almost beyond her own control, and the change was taking her.  Going grimdark meant something else, outside the game.  Meant a change beyond the rules of solid reality – meant inviting something into that life that truly couldn’t belong there and might change whatever it touched like acid burning through.  Maybe there were ancient gods in that hotel, and maybe they were stretching their tentacles out in a new realm.  Learning the Earth, and deciding what might become of it.

Rose had asked the horrorterrors to give her what she had in their other lives; to help her understand.  Rose had asked the horrorterrors what she’d lost, and what they’d gifted her before.  She had asked them to take away her fear, and help her act.  The horrorterrors had whispered yes, yes sweet, broken mortal thing, yes, and they used her like a doorway.  Began sending her those writings that ushered in the blackdeath trance of the woegothics and whatever lay beyond it.

Tavros had rolled his wheelchair through the hotel lobby, and waited for the elevator to take him up to Rose’s room.  He’d thought about how Kanaya had tried to steer Rose away from the horrorterrors in their “true” lives, and when her door wouldn’t open on its own he stabbed it apart with his own lance.

Rose was there, and she wasn’t there.  She was a shell un-voices poured out of, like a tap left going so long it flooded the motherfucking room – and maybe they were her own words, but Tavros knew no one living was meant to hear them.  Rose turned to look at him with eyes all unflinching brightness, nothing human deep inside.  She smiled, and Tavros wasn’t sure if Rose _herself_ was smiling at all.  Perhaps she was.  Shadows squirmed and clung all around her, smearing tenderly along her skin and reaching out like tentacles grasping at the earthly air.  Wanting it, and seeping in like a stain.

It meant something else, going grimdark in the waking world, yes, and it meant something different going grimdark in a timeline with no extra lives to fall back on.  No hope of waking a “dream-self,” or whatever the fuck.  No hope of holy transcendence.

At first, Tavros wasn’t sure what to do – he called to Rose, and he watched her pull a pair of twin knitting needles from her strife specibus.  Maybe she was going to duel him, there; maybe she was joining their Red Team, twirling her needle-wands along with liquid shadow between her fingers in some kinda anticipation.  Maybe.  But all of a sudden, Tavros didn’t wait to find out. 

The way he described it reminded Gamzee of a bull charging forward, tossing their head back, wild and raw and pounding over the earth so a motherfucker’s bones rattled with it like at a bloodily raucous worship circus show.  Some kinda motherfucking warpath, even if Tavros ended up doing possibly the most Tavros-y thing possible.  It was choosing to act, though, when action might change everything.  It was choosing to act when lives dangled in the balance, and there was no one else there to say yeah, or wait up, brother, or have Tavros’s back at all.

Tavros thought of horrorterrors, the very same horrorterrors that were reaching out through Rose’s voice, and then a little about Feferi’s lusus.  Gl'bgolyb was one of them, Feferi had said.  A being so, so like them that she could change her troll charge’s soul.  Change her inherent _being_ into something ancient and strange, the very selfsame motherfucking way Rose was being changed.  Tavros thought of the horrorterrors, and then he stretched out the warmth and Summoning of his blood.  Called to them.  Communed with them, not as a devout worshipper in spells and offerings but just the way he nudged up against Jade’s dog-lusus’s mind to find out what sort of game he felt like playing.  He wasn’t sure if it would work, when he tried it.

He said it was something like faith, and Gamzee was so, so proud of him.  He said it was something like the hope Eridan was supposed to champion (or maybe destroy?) in whatever their other lives had been.  He said he’d wondered why he might be right there at that moment, him and no one else.  What could _Tavros Nitram_ do?

Tavros had felt his voice, his mind, suspended in the eternal unflinching void beyond life.  Derse spun just at the corner of his sight, its chained second-self creaking, full of winding empty stairways.  The same dusky nighttime stairways described in Rose’s novels, yeah – and there was Skaia, too, all gory chessboard battlefields and blue-green life.  There was Prospit so far away, where Tavros knew just then – knew beyond doubt – that he would always lie sleeping, hands folded over his chest, a half-smile on like he was dreaming something gentle and easy.  Tavros felt himself crumpled, shaking in Rose’s hotel room, and Tavros spoke to the horrorterrors, gods so ancient and fearsome and tangled, just the way he’d speak to any beasts.  He could understand them, and maybe he could’ve control them if he’d wanted.  If he held stronger than a troll should be able to; if he was willing to give up himself to do it.  

But Tavros always went for understanding first, and _then_ he figured out what had to be done…  Like with how he’d tried to understand Bec, when they’d played fetch with human satellites.

It shouldn’t have been possible, and maybe it wouldn’t have been in any other world.  Maybe it was another glitch in the code of their reality; maybe it was another symptom of how broken they had always been.  That was alright.  Gamzee thought it was motherfucking alright as anything, so long as it was the truth.

The horrorterrors had handed back Rose’s mind, bundled up in twitching shadow and cosmic unreal tentacles.  They’d handed back her skin, forever changed but solid and not _quite_ dead yet.  The horrorterrors had whispered of changes coming, of another joining them deep in their hidden space.  Soon, very soon, they said. 

Tavros had thanked them.  He said he thought maybe they _adored_ Rose, in their unreadable, cold, cold way.  He said they were motherfucking terrifying, all writhing ruinous limbs and so many staring eyes, so many ragged beaks huge enough to crack planets in two so all the molten juices spurted out and the whole world burned.  They were terrifying, but they responded to Gl'bgolyb’s name, responded to Gl'bgolyb’s plans.

If Gl'bgolyb needed Rose, for whatever reason, apparently she could have her!  And now Rose was there with them, and she had a half-finished tea cup sitting up on one of Equius’s dainty, cracked and pasted-back-together china saucers.  When Gamzee called it some sort of prophesied broken-universe miracle, she didn’t disagree with him.

Things slowed down for a little while, after that.  They sort of had to, both for Terezi to look over the info they’d gotten from Dirk Strider’s hive – charting out choice-paths and whatever her Seer of Mind stuff meant, to try and figure out the way most likely to lead them all back where they needed to be – and for the three heroes gathered together so far to get their feet again.  Get their feet with one another, mostly, after everything that had happened. 

John got used to his clattering metal skin, too – he re-learned how to walk quietly, and seemed delighted that he could beat everyone but Terezi (and sometimes Gamzee, _if_ he turned on his mirthful murder-quickness) when racing around the ship.  John and Jade played with Bec the dog-lusus and picked out a wardrobe of dorky human movie shirts to make John feel more at home in his body.  They designed some fancy new functions Jade would install for him, including collapsible piano-playing equipment in his arm and a rocket-pack spine thingy Equius said was just asking for trouble.  John and Rose explored the star maps Terezi had been annotating with notes about their adventures so far, laughing together over planets neither of them could’ve ever expected to be real.  They talked for a long time, about Rose’s mom-lusus and whether they’d gotten to say an actual goodbye, ever, after so many sweeps of misunderstanding each other…  About how Rose had felt alone for so long, after Jade cut romantic ties between them, and had sometimes wondered if she’d be alone for the rest of her time in their stunted reality.    

It was Rose who went to go find Jade, after a while of awkward creeping around each other.  After John had talked about Kanaya, and how much Jade still wanted to be friends.  After he’d talked about the way Jade still read all Rose’s books the day they came out, and had kept every letter they’d traded back and forth, even the old ones discussing that “technicolor eldritch furry abomination” book Jade had told Gamzee about. 

Rose found Jade while she was helping Terezi disable a Batterwitch satellite that had begun scanning for them, and they ended up locking themselves in Equius’s respite block to hash things out.  They were in there so long that Equius gave up and started working on some of his tech repairs in Gamzee and Karkat’s room. 

(Karkat wasn’t the biggest fan of that development, what with all the new scraps of razor-sharp metal and tiny screws lying around their floor.   He admitted that at least the humans got to sort out some of their motherfucking shit, though.  They’d have to get respite blocks set up for the lot of them, actually, on their journey back to Alternia.)

Rose was rubbing Jade’s back, when they finally left Equius’s respite block behind.  Looking at her all tenderly, the way one of her book-wizards might look at a terrifying creature summoned from beyond life.  The way she might look at someone she never thought she’d get to smile for again.  A friend she’d been worrying about quietly for sweeps, from practically the other side of the world.  She was saying, “Enough about that, tell me about your _transporter gun_ , alright?  You’re truly living the mad scientist dream, my dear,” and they both looked like they’d been crying.  Crying, but not too motherfucking sad anymore.  Crying, but they were about to get John in on an old video game they’d been playing together but never beaten long, long back, before he died.

The humans were carrying plenty of pain with them, leaving Earth behind for a while, but that wasn’t the end of their truth.   Gamzee’d noticed the stockpile of human alcohol slowly making its way onto their ship, and he’d noticed Jade’s worried glances at it, too.  He’d heard Rose saying how awful it had been to feel so completely out of control – out of control as the horrorterrors poured their voices through her – but something in her own natural voice felt like a ringmaster hoping to take back her show.  Jade asked if she was relieved Kanaya Maryam truly existed, and when Rose hesitated, guiltily, she’d assured her it was fine.  She wanted her to be happy, and whole.  As whole as she could be.

There were a few close calls, honestly, when the Alternian Empire on Earth almost detected them and came in for the cull.  A couple times they had to double up on their cloaks and swerve that hive-ship out into the darkness beyond Earth’s moon until a threat passed…  A couple times when Equius had to broadcast luring signals off somewhere fucking else and get those motherfuckers good and lost.  Maybe good and exploded, too, depending on what that guy had rigged his lure up to do?  Terezi didn’t think they had a whole lot more time left in Earth’s orbit before shit got too real, though.  Before they’d probably have to do a whole lot more subjugglation or get blasted out of the motherfucking sky before they ever got to see the battle for Alternia. 

That was probably why she decided to take it a couple steps farther, trying to reach the Knight of Time.  Terezi said she’d scanned whatever choice-paths she could see, changed now that they'd gotten the suspect list from Dave's brother-lusus and she'd narrowed down where he might be, all those possibilities sprawling around them like one of Vriska’s lusus’s choking webs...  And one of the better choice-paths – one of the ones least likely to end with all of them _and_ Dave Strider culled – involved sweeping in at Dave while he was mid-battle heist. That, and Gamzee’s motherfucking almost-nonexistent chucklevoodoos?      


	12. Are chucklevoodoos supposed to feel like falling?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiiii~~~ :D Happy Easter, (if you celebrate it, of course, I don't wanna be presumptuous), and happy April Fool's Day, and... Happy Sunday! I hope everything this day is has been going wonderfully for you so far. Welcome to chapter 12~
> 
> A couple things.... Ummm...  
> 1\. I'm sorry this is so long. I really tried to edit it down, but somehow I just made it longer. Ahahaha... Dang.  
> 2\. There is death in this chapter. Just... Yeahhh.... I debated whether a warning was necessary here, but better safe than sorry really. 
> 
> Thank you so so much, again, for reading. Have a great week!!

Terezi’s new scheme for catching up with Dave Strider was all winding and complex, Gamzee thought, kinda like her FLARP-ing plans with Vriska had been when they were wigglers.  Back when the Scourge Sisters were battling young, stubbly-finned seadwellers for heaps of treasure in historic replica pirate ships, not pitting themselves against the might of motherfucking intergalactic war machines.  Different times, though Terezi hadn’t changed too much.  She still grinned so wide and sharp her smile might’ve been a curved blade; she still quizzed Gamzee on everything she’d said afterwards, ‘cause she didn’t really expect him to remember all of it.  

Ever since they’d escaped human Texas and Terezi’d had some time to check into the list of Alternian agent suspects they got from Dave’s brother-lusus, she had known they could be so, so close.  She could smell it all over, she said, like the smothering cologne Equius had picked up to mask his own sweat (and which had been almost immediately banished to the ship’s darkest closet.)  Like regret, or sticks of red chalk, or some of John’s dad-lusus’s cake they’d brought back wrapped in tinfoil.  Terezi had caught glimpses of Dave consistently, now, so she thought she _knew_ where he was hiding.  Never too far from one of those Batterwitch operation nests – never losing focus on the next objective, which she thought wasn’t an altogether _bad_ quality in a person.  But he was just so unfairly _fast_ …  Almost as if time didn’t have an ordinary hold on him.  The second he realized he’d been found, Dave backtracked and reinvented his own course.  Vanished, again.                  

The only way to get this shit done was to surprise that coolkid, said Terezi, and get to him motherfucking fast before he could Knight of Time his way out.  Gamzee had no reason to argue with her logic.  Terezi told him how she’d considered abducting Dave in a beam of shivery science light, or something, like in one of those human movies with the cows and the cornfields.  That _could’ve_ worked if she’d timed it just right…  Except that she’d seen a handful of choice-paths where any sort of abduction ended with Dave taking out their whole motherfucking ship.  It was possible she could lure him by posing as a deadly Alternian agent, too, but a lot of what she saw along _that_ road involved shit she described as “side quests” which could eat up too much of their time.  Screw Feferi’s revolution over, all ‘cause Rose got wrapped up in some arcane artifact smuggling drama, or Gamzee accidentally became some motherfuckers’ auspistice.  Dammit, Makara. 

Sure, there were other roads they could take, other schemes they could choose to surprise Dave Strider and keep him still enough to listen.  But _this_ one might have been the best, and hey, Gamzee didn’t fucking have any better ideas.  Terezi explained the plan to him as patiently as she could – her words.  That meant a lot of scribbling-rainbow diagrams and instructions in one of those buttery notebooks he used for painting.  One of the notebooks saved from their trip to see the Juggling Eclipse, so many weeks back.  Gamzee remembered it like a turning point and a happy dream all smudged together into one.  A trip that’d changed his life, and paved the way for all the space rebel stuff they had going on now.  It felt kinda fitting, using those notebooks to plot stuff out, even if he did hope Terezi left at least a couple blank pages.   

In not too, too long, see, Dave was gonna attack an underground chemical processing base – someplace mechanical and full of glittery royal fuchsia neon, where the Condesce’s forces on Earth made a lot of the weird shit they stuffed into human baked goods.  Terezi’d mapped the place out, and after studying the Knight of Time’s battle tactics for so motherfucking long she thought she had a pretty good idea how he’d do his thing.  She’d be there, then, waiting with Rose and Jade.  And while Dave was fighting a path through one of the final hallways, making his way down to a cooking chamber full of especially volatile, merciless chemical shit he’d get to explode, Gamzee would stretch out with his priestly chucklevoodoos and drag every Alternian subconscious there with him into dreaming.  Terezi didn’t care what kind of dream he fed them, only that they dropped down limp at Dave’s feet.  Only that he saw the purple blood-light crackling through their eyelids, and knew they were down for the count while Rose and Jade came to gather him in.  Came to explain what all there was to know.

When Gamzee said, “That shit’s not gonna work, though.  Sorry,” Terezi raised her eyebrows and hissed a little laughter through her fangs.  She said of course it could work – she’d already _felt_ it work, the same way she’d felt out their path to Earth.  Seer of Mind powers, you know?  She said Dave wouldn’t want to hurt his friends, so once he knew Rose and Jade were truly themselves he could finally allow himself to listen; she said it was the ideal hallway to strike from, too, ‘cause there’d be sealed electric barriers on either end of the passage.  Jade’s teleportation guns could get through those easy, but it would take the Condesce’s people a while to know what was up and rally more forces.  All that noise.  

Nah, though.  Gamzee thought it wouldn’t work because of his own ruined, aching chucklevoodoos.  He tried to explain that shit, but Terezi was like, “Are you saying I’m a liar?  _I’m_ the one who can smell lies, last time I checked.  Your clown magic’ll work the way it needs to work, obviously.”

Gamzee wasn’t calling her a liar.  He was just feeling frozen in a way Terezi couldn’t seem to tell.  His chucklevoodoos didn’t work right: he’d known _that_ for a long time, now.  Having any kind of motherfucking faith in them – learning to believe in shit he’d thought for sure was just false and taunting untruth, blasphemy like what his other, useful life had to be to him – made him feel like a mime trying to climb out of a box he’d believed in just a little too hard.  Hard enough that the air had become solid and unforgiving and shoving at it made his torn-up shoulder burn and stretch all Jade’s careful stitches.  Some Subjugglator mimes had suffocated in boxes like that, he’d heard, when they ran out of breath.  And that was the motherfucking power of faith for you, wasn’t it?  Faith enough to kill a motherfucker in a box of air. 

Terezi said, “Look at it this way: what if learning to sense fear slowly – the way you’ve been doing since before we got to Earth, _by the way_ – was always leading you up to this?  Getting you ready for the future we’d choose.”

Gamzee thought.  He sighed.  Offered, “Uh, I guess that could be motherfucking true?”

And so, because of the pathways Terezi felt sprawling out after every choice they made like cracks in glass, Gamzee learned first that he _could_ give himself over to his holy chucklevoodoos, even with all his sopor-rot, and also that he would have to figure out how to get them going in all their most mirthful blood-right sooner than really seemed possible.  Or…  Get whatever he had left of them working, by that point, scraping the edges of his thinkpan like for slime all crusted at the bottom of a tin. 

But even so.  Even so, _Gamzee knew what he had to do._ How could he not, with Terezi shoving him into her screen-surveillance chair and snapping at him not to spill human soda all over the keyboards like with his own poor, sticky husktop back on Alternia?  She and Equius orchestrated practice jobs for him, when they weren’t trying to keep the whole team from getting caught.  Testing out his stumbling clown inheritance on themselves.  Drifting away in shuttles so he could practice stretching his grip over distance; pointing out crowds on the screen and asking him to reach for human fear.  He was supposed to brush only the surface of the mind – (‘cause Jade assured them anything else would be creepy as fuck, and this was already the kind of creepy she could only really tolerate for world-saving purposes) – and taste for different flavors of churning, restless subconscious, so when the time came he’d only smear his dreaming into the Alternian minds waiting in that single fated hallway.  Cold and insect-chittering Alternian minds, brother, more ancient than any human breathing on Earth.

The more Gamzee practiced, trying to believe in the chucklevoodoos he’d convinced himself would always be like looking through cracks in the worship circus tent, catching only hints of whatever slaughter revelry was all up and going on inside – the more he felt like maybe he _knew_ his other self had gotten his stunted blood-magic working, and…  More importantly than that…  Like maybe he already knew how it’d gone down.  Felt it leaking through his dreams more and more; felt it when he reached too far into Equius’s oily, gear-grinding subconscious.  It wasn’t something he liked thinking on much.

It was rage, wasn’t it?  Rage that had cracked his chucklevoodoos open like a skull, like a secret.  It was the sort of merciless, hysterical rage like what could make a whole universe terminal. 

“terminallyCapricious” – that had been Gamzee’s name on Trollian for as long as he could remember, but he didn’t think his wiggler self had meant “terminal” the way it felt, now.  The way he knew it must’ve always been.  “Terminal” like a dead thing; “terminal” like surrender and ruin, rotting in his other head, enough to end a world. 

No, Gamzee didn’t like thinking on it much, but maybe chucklevoodoos and such a terminal rage went together for him.  A package set, like Equius and his collection of hoofbeast art, or like Gamzee’s grey beach hive and always having sand in your shoes.  Maybe _that_ was what he needed to become to reach the blood-magic his team needed?  It was like a poison-powder ball pit Gamzee didn’t want to fall into; it was a line he was viscerally afraid to cross, because maybe he already knew the kind of change it could bring in him.

But still, he tried what he could.  For the motherfucking Red Team.  For these friends who’d decided to believe in him, despite whatever it was they remembered from _their_ lost lives.  And really, mostly nothing happened whenever Gamzee tried to tap into his chucklevoodoos.  That sucked ‘cause they only had a little, little while left before Terezi said it would be too late for this plan to work and she’d have to gamble on something deadlier. 

Gamzee was getting better at sensing fear, though: a stronger idea of it moving around him like the air.  Equius said he didn’t mind Gamzee practicing on him, too, even when whatever the fuck he was going for _did_ work – whispering with his voice all crackly and unreal in Equius’s pan, maybe, or stirring up his dreams to send funny little messages instead of the comical-wild terrors he’d have been using if he was raised different, raised as one of Her Imperious Condescension’s own clowns. 

He gave Equius dreams like – _“now you’re running with a herd of thundering robotic hoofbeasts, brother, and that blue blood you’re so damn proud of’s been replaced by thrumming oil.”_  Dreams like – _“now you and me, we’re going to the motherfucking carnival, and we’re gonna win all the prizes from that test of strength machine.”_  Equius admitted that he almost enjoyed those dreams, a couple times, and scolded Gamzee for not changing out the fizzing purple-stained bandages on his shoulder more often.

But still, it didn’t feel like any of that motherfucking practice was happening fast enough.  It felt like Gamzee’d disappoint his team for sure, and they’d all end up shaking their heads like they should’ve known he’d fail them the whole fucking time. 

A little while passed, then, and Gamzee spent most of it thinking on fear.  On that coiling subconscious every motherfucker carried inside themselves, sometimes like a cup of rage and worries always just about to overflow, sometimes like a hidden world nobody could ever hope to map completely.  Gamzee described what he knew about fear to Rose Lalonde off and on when he wasn’t practicing it, actually, ‘cause she wanted to take some notes for reference.   She took a lot of notes, that Rose, smiling to herself like her wizards did in their books. 

The Alternian Empire on Earth was coming for them all the time, too, though, and Gamzee thought on _another_ kind of fear whenever they got close.  Terezi said it was still pretty motherfucking possible they could get sizzled up in Earth’s atmosphere so the humans would write mystified scientific papers about them – it was still possible they’d get strung all limp in pretty chains and culled for their crimes.  The Earth-bound Alternians would relish it, too, ‘cause they didn’t get to do so many proper executions out there.  And Earth TV was still all bloodless and sweet, compared to the shows you got back home in the Condesce’s space.

So every now and then, Terezi had to raise up an extra-pointy, glitter-polished claw and be like, “Hold that thought, I’ve gotta go pilot this thing.  Don’t move an inch – I’ll be able to smell if you do!”  Meant it was time for evasive maneuvers Equius would’ve accidentally shattered the controls trying to pull off, then…  Or else they all had to hold painfully still, ship skewed at weird, movie collection-toppling angles until Terezi declared some Alternian search craft had passed them by.  More of that Seer of Mind stuff they’d been talking about. 

They all did what they could.  Tavros made sure both their shuttles were always stocked and ready to go, in case the Red Team needed to make a quick getaway, for instance; Jade aimed her teleportation gun all carefully out among the stars, locking onto the Condesce’s satellites and sending ‘em to roast on the surface of Earth’s pale and watery sun.

Gamzee stood lookout at the helm while Karkat and Jade took John Egbert down to see his dad-lusus again, too…  Against pretty much everyone’s better judgment.  That was one of the better things that happened, really, while they were waiting for Dave Strider’s day to come.  John knew he’d be wanted back home, even raised from the dirt by smoldering alien blood his dad wouldn’t have ever motherfucking heard about before – he’d be wanted back home in a metal skin, rattling on about the upgrades Jade had planned for his robotic shell.  John’s dad-lusus would worry about them all while they were away, wherever they went.  He asked after John’s Prankster’s Gambit stat; he asked if there was anything he could do to help them out or whatever. 

Gamzee thought it was beautiful.

That waiting, between-time couldn’t last forever, of course, and as the day Dave Strider was supposed to go after the Alternian chemical base crept closer – a laughsassin giggling all secret-like about the kinda balloon animals they’d twist out of some poor motherfucker’s organs – Gamzee got angrier and angrier at his own self.  Maybe his chucklevoodoos weren’t as broken as he’d always believed, yeah, but how the fuck could they be what he needed from them in time?  Still couldn’t stretch that shit over to more than one mind at once, see.  Still couldn’t hold a motherfucker in dreaming for longer than a handful of breaths. 

Worst thing was, Gamzee _saw_ his mental block.  He knew it just the same as he knew the taste of a rage that wasn’t his own, and all that hurting his other self carried that he’d never wanted to think could be real.  Gamzee didn’t want the staring blue plastic puppet-eyes haunting Dirk Strider’s apartment – he didn’t want the rattling trapped-as-blasphemy-in-a-worship-circus refrigerator prison, or his friends’ blood crusted over his skin like he’d become one of his ancestor’s own painted-up throne rooms.  Didn’t want any of it.

And that had to be the problem, right?  Gamzee stared at his belief – at his invisible, smothering mime-box, just shifted a little now but still locked tight – for what felt like sweeps.  Considering how he could outsmart his own faith.  He figured he could do what Terezi needed from him, probably – what all his friends needed from him – if only he could figure out how to actually fucking let himself.

Gamzee considered talking to Karkat about all that noise lots of motherfucking times, as the day he was sure he’d let everyone down slunk up on them, but Karkat came to him, first.  Karkat clamped a firm hand on his chin, too, making him jump – Gamzee had been staring down at his own shaking, sopor-numb claws, trying to see if he even _could_ hold them still anymore.  Karkat jerked his face around to look him in the eye, and honestly it was way more pale-romantic than Gamzee’d be able to describe it later (when Tavros asked if it’d hurt his neck, or something.) 

“Terezi said you need me,” Karkat announced.  “It’s the ‘next step of the plan,’ or something…  I’m a little offended she’d think I need help with my quadrants like this, but I’d be even more offended – by myself, obviously – if I pulled some bullshit like refusing to be there for you out of cosmic Seer-related spite.  So, spill.  Sit down with me, Gamzee.  Please.”

Gamzee hadn’t realized there was a step in Terezi’s scheme related to Karkat drawing him close and sifting through the tangles in his head again, but there was plenty of her plan he hadn’t heard, yet.  It would come together when it was ready, with teal blood slick and tangy on the tile, with Dave Strider’s half-finished apple juice swaying dangerously by the helm computer.  But Gamzee couldn’t know what he hadn’t learned.  For now, he just slumped with Karkat in front of Terezi’s restless, murmuring screens.  If anyone could’ve gotten Gamzee to explain the rage – or, what little, stinging tastes of it had soaked in through his dreams, anyway – it had to be Karkat.  And as Gamzee told him everything he knew, voice heavy and sopor-blurred even now, Karkat nodded.  Squeezed Gamzee’s long claws, and held them stiller than they ever could’ve gone on their own.    

When he was done…  Done talking about the suffocating mime-box that had been believing first in how he couldn’t have motherfucking chucklevoodoos, and then in the way that blood-magic might come to be…  Karkat said, “You realize you’re being a hypocrite here, right?” and his calm helped more than Gamzee would’ve thought.  Shifted his head completely as the sudden snap of a neck – like tearing off a bandage, like the moment a pie kicked in and the world began melting together all at once.  Terezi must’ve known it would happen just that way.  Karkat said Gamzee should’ve known better than to hold himself to the same standards as some guy from another motherfucking life.  Hadn’t _he_ been the one telling Karkat he didn’t have to be bound to his other self’s mistakes, back when he was wading around in another lifetime’s guilt?

“Holy shit,” Karkat said.  “If I could copy-paste your _actual words_ into this conversation, I would.”  And Gamzee laughed at that.  It was a relief, knowing laughter could come so easily, then.  Like the surprise a motherfucker got, stepping on a honk-horn all out of the blue.  Even without a whole lot of time left to get his act together, circling Earth for only a couple more days before they had to get the fuck back to their own desperate universe.

Just because one version of Gamzee had opened up his chucklevoodoos with rage didn’t mean it was the only way all that shit could be done.  The way Karkat saw it, maybe Gamzee’s other self had been feeling some kinda motherfucking release along with all that divine and cleansing hurt.  Maybe he had been shoved along by a _want_ deeper than sopor could’ve ever sunken inside him.  He had wanted truth, and unraveling; he had wanted the universe to fall apart and be remade to the mirthful designs of bleeding prophesy.  But this broken universe’s Gamzee, the only self he could ever truly be, was allowed to want something else with the whole of himself.  In fact, Karkat recommended they at least try it out.  Like when Jade had agreed to try traditional Alternian breakfast foods for science, and ended up screaming, swiping her plate off the table on impulse when she realized it was begging her not to eat it in a tiny clicking insectoid voice.  

Karkat asked, “What do _you_ want, the way your other self wanted rage?” and Gamzee just shook his head.  He held his moirail for a while, then – for as long as Karkat would let him, really – sorting out his thoughts like coins and bells and chunks of soggy bone plucked out of a mirthful church collection basket.  The next time he practiced his chucklevoodoos on Equius, they came a little easier, though.  And the next time, and the next.  Chucklevoodoos didn’t mean only rage, to the whole of the mirthful church.  Never had.  That other, painful life wasn’t this Gamzee’s own. 

Gamzee didn’t feel ready by the time Dave Strider’s attack-day sprung from the hidden places of his hive and all metaphorically itching to paint something haunted and whimsical out of his insides.  But Jade said she didn’t feel ready, either, so that made it a little more okay.  Jade hugged Gamzee before she, Rose and Terezi left to take their positions, too.  She asked if it was encouraging to tell a murder clown death priest something like, _“Break a leg!”_ or _“Let’s go be terrifying!”_ and Gamzee said motherfucking yes it fucking was.  He ruffled her hair up a little, and Terezi stood on her tiptoes to ruffle his right back. 

“Ew, it’s sticky,” she said, and Gamzee said, “Haha, damn, I guess it is.”

He watched them on Terezi’s screens, next – he watched until the communicator-thing crackled and Terezi told him to shift his cameras over to the hallway where they’d finally get to string two words in a row with Dave motherfucking Strider. 

The ship felt deathly still all around Gamzee, then.   Like the world was holding its breath.  Everything stayed quiet so long, actually, Gamzee almost didn’t believe it when the Alternian security forces turned up in the hallway he’d been staring down into, grumbling to themselves and dragging all kinds of murder out of their strife specibus inventories.  Gonna make a perimeter Dave would have to bust through.  These were the minds Gamzee would have to feed a dream to, these motherfuckers right there.  Minds admiring their own electric battle-sabers, minds wishing it wasn’t so long until lunch.  Gamzee thought again about the dream – the vast, painful wanting – he was going to swallow all those motherfucking minds up in.  Soon.  He shivered, running some claws through his tangled curls.  They were sticky just like Terezi’d said, and Rose’s favorite tentacle-cat Fiduspawn trilled playfully from somewhere behind him.  She was wearing grey and lavender ribbons, now, and Rose had taught her a couple tricks for the next intergalactic Fiduspawn talent show.

And then, Dave Strider seemed to step out of the motherfucking air.  Gamzee jumped in his skin again, seeing him down in that hallway, and plenty of Alternian agents swore by the Condesce’s own trident.  (A cull-worthy offence, if one of their bosses heard.)  Dave folded a pair of shifting-gear turntables into his inventory and began fucking shit up, lighter on his feet than plenty of Subjugglators Gamzee had known.  That patented poker face of his never even slipped.  Not when he got sticky with cold troll blood, spitting it out of his mouth as if he just didn’t like the taste…  Not when he flicked his wrist and – somehow – not only scrubbed all that too-sweet blood off his suit but _also_ grabbed a fancy human coffee drink to slurp and then toss in some unlucky motherfucker’s face.  The Knight of Time.  Gamzee noticed how Dave’s sword was broken in two, just like the arrest reports had said.   It carved its work out messily, but after such a violent lifetime Dave didn’t seem to notice. 

Gamzee wondered what sort of snarky, pointed comics Dave had tucked into his coat that day, ready to hammer his message home.  Probably at least _one_ of them would feature the infamous Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff – Terezi’d probably want to hold on to it as a memento.  

Gamzee sucked in a slow, soft breath, and reminded himself to not to think about his other self’s hysterical, holy rage.  Not to think about all the times his chucklevoodoos hadn’t worked while training with Equius, or how completely he had believed his blood-magic was too motherfucking eaten away by sweeps and sweeps of sopor to ever bring any real good. 

He reached for the truth in that dream he had chosen, and poured it into the Batterwitch guards’ thinkpans like uncooked pie goo into a tin.  He fell with it, fell willingly and full of pain that was all his own.  Like screaming his way down a Tower of Death ride, back at the carnival, but falling and falling until he was dizzy and smeared as his own clown paint.  He watched his eyes spark mad and biting purple, reflected in the dark patches of Terezi’s screen. 

The Condesce’s agents dropped, but Gamzee only barely saw them.  They fell like sacks of meat ready to get splattered out of a glitter-cannon; like ragdolls heavy with blood.  He fed them glimpses of his paradise planet, then.  Yeah, maybe the one foretold in all those rap-prophesies, with rivers of Faygo tangling and syrupy under a shattered sky.  Maybe.  But something else, too.  Flickering in and out like the world tended to do in dreams, with everything weightless and scrambled as sopor-rot.  Something else, brother, something they could create.  Bleeding as equals.  A new homeworld that always tried, even when it got shit wrong, and a homeworld Gamzee felt he had dreamed from his other life, too.  From beyond the puppet that was his split-in-half soul, beyond rage and wonderment and the horrorterrors whispering in their void.  Sometimes it felt as if the whole motherfucking game must have been played for the sake of that paradise planet, and Gamzee imagined it full of trolls and humans and some people who were neither and both.

It was the sort of dream he woke up from feeling lonely, sometimes, though he’d never looked close enough to say why.  Something to do with Nepeta’s gore scabbed on his clubs, probably.  With carved-up souls and universes gone terminal. 

Gamzee didn’t make the Alternian agents dream that loneliness, though, at least not on purpose.  His paradise planet might’ve been the one from doctrine, might’ve been the one from impure lying remembrance.  Might’ve been something they’d try and try to polish their own Alternia into if they managed not to get themselves all culled trying for revolution.

The world was swimmy and sputtering out at the edges – for Gamzee at least – by the time Rose and Jade cornered Dave Strider and told him whatever would prove their humanity.  Their old, creaky friendship, a friendship Gamzee knew could go strong again with just a little dusting off.  He didn’t exactly listen in – maybe he couldn’t have even if he’d wanted too – but the detached image of Jade and Rose each reaching for Dave at nearly the same time and pulling him into a hug squished between them would stick in his head all the same.  Dave kept his empty expression on then, too, but after a second he reached up, almost gingerly, almost nervous, and patted hands against his old friends’ backs.  He left smears of blood against their clothes.

They talked only a little, little while – mostly since Her Imperious Condescension’s reinforcements would be coming soon, but also ‘cause Gamzee could only keep any dream going for so motherfucking long.  But whatever it was they said, it must’ve been enough.

Dave Strider picked up the ragged sword he’d dropped, seeing his left-behind friends and knowing they’d come for him.  Dave pointed to the Batterwitch’s guards, who were just then starting to stir all groggy and blinking sugary purple light out of their eyes.  It made sense he had questions, really.  They all had answers for him, too, just as soon as he, Rose and Jade fought their way out together.  A team, just like they must’ve been in their other lives. 

And then, next thing Gamzee knew, Karkat was shaking at his good shoulder and smoothing sweaty, clinging hair off his cheek.  The next thing Gamzee knew, his eyes were gummy peeling themselves open, and they had to go.  Karkat said Equius had acted out his part of the Seer’s plan, too – Karkat said Equius had carried back Terezi Pyrope’s body.

Yeah, Terezi’s motherfucking plan had been complicated, more complicated than Gamzee’d ever known.  She’d calculated out his pile time with Karkat, and she’d calculated a way to get her own teal-sharp meat back from the Batterwitch’s base.  She’d known if she went with Jade and Rose in just that specific way, she could be the only one caught while they slipped in where their horrorterror prophesy needed them to be.  There were recordings to watch of all that noise, too – Equius showed them, later.  Terezi grinned impishly, waved up at the camera just seconds before she knew the Condesce’s agents would see her.  Before they opened a steaming hole in her head.  She’d gotten Gamzee to shift his camera away early for a motherfucking reason, brother.  She’d died with that same smile on, and the fractures in her skull reminded Gamzee of the choice-paths she’d described spreading out around every decision they could possibly make.  Not cracks in glass, not really.  Cracks in skull.  Cracks in Terezi, herself.   She’d worn her best pair of bright red socks, too.

Karkat had been crying, just before he came to wake Gamzee up.  His tears smelled warm and sweet, staining the air all around so a brother couldn’t help but know. 

Everything about the hive-ship’s helm felt different with Terezi’s body spread out where a motherfucker’s computer usually went.  Gamzee was gathered there with everyone – everyone from that original Red Team, you know – when the humans got back.  John had met his friends at the ship hatch, so Dave could sling and arm around his metal shoulder if he wanted to.  So Dave…  His knight, in a way, his avenger, even if he hadn’t actually wanted any of that blood-tribute…  Could see his warmth through that whirring metal skin and taste something merciful as peace.  John just wanted his fucking friend back, of course.  Gamzee believed in that much.  John wanted to see if any of the jokes left behind on his grave could make Dave Strider laugh again.

Actually, Dave still had his arm wrapped all tight and motherfucking protective around John when they made it to the helm, though everybody got shuffling and quieter when they saw Terezi there. 

Dave said, “Oh shit.  Her.”  And then a pause.  Gamzee thought his face looked softer, close up, and not so stark as his brother’s had become.  There were freckles scattered over his nose like spilled paint, or vigilante justice blood-spray faded into his skin.  His voice was so intentionally blank, so cold.  “I’ve dreamed about that one.  I thought I’d made her up, or _they_ were using her to fuck with me.”

And Equius said, “I have already prepared a robotic body for Terezi, of course.  Ms. Megido and I have discussed – ”

But Dave wasn’t finished just yet.  He patted John hard on the back, unslinging his arm; he took a couple sliding steps forward, wagging a finger all theatrically in the air.  Gamzee couldn’t see Dave Strider’s eyes through his infamous coolkid shades – which made him even harder to read than the other alien teammates they’d gathered up – but he let his eyes drip blankly over the sharp-pressed lines of Dave’s suit instead.  Over the scars left scribbled up his neck, carried away after so many battles lived before.  Times it looked as though his throat must have been cut.  Times he should’ve lost an eye, but somehow, somehow, hadn’t.

“This one’s tricky,” Dave interrupted.  See?  Not quite done yet, brother.  “I’m gonna check the pockets.  No.  Those socks she probably says taste like cherries…  I’m gonna check the socks.”

“ _We’ve already checked the fucking socks_ ,” hissed Karkat.  But then he groaned.  “Fine, whatever.  Do what you have to, Strider.”

“I always do,” said Dave.  He glanced back at John when he said it, as if trying to guess if his long-dead friend thought he sounded cool.  They all knew it was true, anyway – they’d seen the newspaper reports, after all.  Gamzee’d seen him in the Batterwitch base hallway, fighting for John’s memory the way trolls fought for their blood-soaked Empress. 

The message was scrawled in combination red and teal ink, its folded-up paper actually sewn into the fabric of Terezi’s left sock.  Like a little game – like a challenge.  There you fucking go.  It had a bunch of detailed instructions on the back, but on the front just a huge, teasing announcement:

“1F YOU DON’T W4NT TO CH34T –

YOUR MOV3, COOLK1D.  >:]”

Dave silently reached for those fancy gear-turntable things he’d used, when he appeared in the Batterwitch’s base like magic.  Like a gory, rampaging miracle, there for his best friend who’d been culled as a wiggler in his own human bed.  He cleared his throat, and maybe that stoic lip of his jerked up into a grudging half-smile.  Probably not, though.  Gamzee’s eyes were still all sticky and raw, and his head had been replaced with one huge ache.

Dave said, “I’m not exactly a ‘kid,’ this time around, but okay then.”  Said it like he knew exactly what he had to next.


	13. All together now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHHHH!!! The last chapter. :’) Thank you very, very much to everyone who’s read this and encouraged me along the way~~~ I really value the time you’ve given this fic (second in its trilogy, gasp!!), and I hope it’s been a fun ride for you!!

So Dave Strider carried out Terezi’s plan – whether or not he peeked at the “cheating” notes she’d left behind for him, plotted out all methodically on folded paper and sewn up into the fabric of her sock.  Some kind of “ _Welcome to the motherfucking Red Team”_ game, Gamzee thought it felt like, despite everything…  Despite the way Terezi’d passed the notes along even as she lay dead, her empty meat smiling up at their hive-ship’s ceiling.  Her skull had been blown open by one off the Batterwitch’s guards, of course, and her hair was clumped with teal blood that smelled all thick and sharp, like human mouthwash.  Dave used the Knight of Time powers he wasn’t supposed to have in their unchosen universe to bring her home still wearing her own cackling skin.  _And_ bring her home without causing too many snags in the timeline – without causing too much death he’d have to rewind and undo, like reworking a worship circus act a gazillion motherfucking times over until all the harshwhimsical bleeding doctrine got acted just right. 

Dave claimed he hadn’t even had to read through Terezi’s notes to get it done, but he said so in a knowing monotone that meant it was possible he’d gotten Rose to read through them for him.  Or some loophole like that, something they’d thought was funny while getting to know each other again.  He said it with a dramatic, hesitantly-playful wink that he knew Terezi would be able to sniff out through his shades, too.  That’s what she told Gamzee later, anyway, snickering down into a handful of her star maps that’d gotten all out of order while she was away.  She said Dave’d smelled like guilt and triumph together the second he came for her, reaching through the wall with one of Jade’s teleportation guns firing at him all constantly – warping him into something temporarily intangible.  He had an equally intangible distraction kit slung over his shoulder and built up _just_ to Terezi’s specifications.

It didn’t sound like she minded any of that too badly, though.  The choice-map she’d planned had led the Knight of Time down some strange paths, before it was over and he was able to snatch her from the past at exactly the right moment.  She’d probably always meant for him to wind up with a brand-new fossilized pterodactyl-y Fiduspawn of his own, by the end of things, and feeling a little more like he could become a real part of their Red Team.  It was a way to cram some togetherness in fast, Gamzee suspected, while also prepping Dave on some of Terezi’s favorite Legislacerator dramas – for discussion purposes, you know – before they even left Earth.     

Strange paths, yeah, woven in with whatever the fuck Dave had to do to set it up so Terezi could come home while still causing a distraction, still getting Rose and Jade where they needed to be to reach out for him.  That hallway where Gamzee’d poured his chucklevoodoos out into the world, right?  Dream-blurry and crackling all through his skull like his thinkpan had gotten itself soaked in whispering static.  Gamzee wasn’t sure exactly what helping Aradia and Rose sneak into the heavily-guarded and _way_ too booby-trapped Lalonde Manor to temporarily resurrect Rose’s mom-lusus had to do with reversing Terezi’s death, for instance…  But it was a changing point all the same, for every motherfucker involved.  Rose had wanted to say goodbye, after all.  She’d told John as much, not too long ago, and she wasn’t gonna get a chance for a long fucking time once they set off for Alternia. 

Dave came back from that particular journey looking thoughtful and calling Aradia by a couple playful nicknames.  Discussing fossils and ruined, ancient moons with her – dead languages and moments held eternally in photographs like spindly Earth bugs in amber.  All that old shit, bound and rust-scabbed to their shared aspect.  Time, brother.  Knight of Time, meet Maid of Time, wandered in from some other fucking life. 

Maybe it made Dave see their team a little differently, finding himself in Aradia like that.  A troll not planning to motherfucking cull him and his friends – _especially_ his friends – first, and then a whole ton of trolls with so much reason to hate Her Imperious Condescension’s empire just the same as he did.  And that was probably what Terezi’d been going for, Gamzee figured.  That was probably what Terezi had hoped would come to be.

Rose came back from all that resurrection stuff looking thoughtful, too, of course, with her arms folded tight around herself and most of her makeup rubbed away onto the back of her hand.   But it seemed like a good kind of thoughtful to Gamzee, like she’d just figured out why the clubs she was spinning hadn’t been landing safe in her claws just right – why bones had splintered without snapping, why laughing gas had fizzled out into a choke.  Her mom-lusus had swum back into being almost as soon as Aradia called for her, apparently, all bubblegum-pink and woozy, shifting light.  Gamzee would hear all about it later – Roxy Lalonde had thrown hollow breathless hands over her smile, eyes soft and less tipsy than Rose thought she had ever seen them.  A herd of eager mutant purrbeast souls had trotted out from around her feet: in death as in life.  Sometimes she was gory, warped beyond herself and struggling to hold her face together.  Sometimes she was wearing strappy heels.  

“Rosie,” she’d said.  “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again!”

Whenever Rose had said shit like, “I’m sorry you died the way you did,” Roxy had echoed back along the lines of – “ _I’m_ sorry, baby.  I’d wanted to be such a good mom to you, and I know I wasn’t…  What I could’ve been.  I _know_ I should’ve been more careful, you have no reason to feel guilty.” 

And Aradia had plugged her ears, just the way Rose’d asked her to; and Dave had kept lookout, until – as Terezi’s note said – _“1F YOU ST4Y TOO LONG TH3Y’LL G3T SOM3 SUMMON3RS TO SW4RM TH3 M4NOR W1TH B34STS.  1T W1LL SUCK FOR YOU.”_

It meant something to Rose, hearing her mom-lusus’s voice again before she was an entire universe away, whatever kinda beasts she and her teammates had to abscond from…  Whatever her lusus-relationship had been like, before, and whatever her teenage self might have thought about admitting she’d wanted to say goodbye so motherfucking badly.  Gamzee could tell it in the squirming tentacles of fear all around her – a softening, a release.  He started telling Rose about that for her fear-studies notes, but once he’d gotten going and noticed how worn and bruised her eyes were he changed his tune fast.  Said something about fear in general, that day, so wobbly and apologetic that she patted his arm and said, “A valiant effort,” with one of her wry, tangled-thread smiles.

Dave brought Terezi home at just the right moment.  When he had what she called a decent respect for her crazy-good planning skills, and when he’d already won a rap battle vs. both Gamzee and Tavros.  (They’d scheduled a rematch, too, which Equius had threatened to record and nitpick to the Dark Carnival and back.  Something about helping his kismesis “hone his ability.”  Sounded motherfucking fantastic, brother, so far as Gamzee was concerned…  But also potentially _very_ annoying and pretentious, given all the disdainful sniffs Equius had been tossing around during their last rap battle.  That was sort of the point, probably.  Something to look forward to.) 

Also, Dave brought Terezi home just a few minutes before a couple Alternian agents successfully hacked into their ship’s control system – so that was a plus, too.  If they hadn’t just kinda waved at Terezi and hightailed it out of range, then – back into the staring quiet of that motherfucking universe their other selves had created – of course it would’ve meant death.

And that was how they left the Earth behind.  That planet Gamzee and his friends had built together, during the course of a game they’d never played, a game that couldn’t possibly exist.  They left with all Earth’s four heroes gathered together and getting ready for whatever came next.  War, don’t you know it, brother.  Getting ready for war, and remaking, and their Heiress who was changing herself into something arcane and ancient, stranger with every stirring of her coldest blood. 

There had only been one thing on Terezi’s plan for Dave marked “Optional,” and that was the one thing he didn’t fucking do.  It had meant checking in on his brother-lusus before heading out for Alternian space.  Maybe starting up on talks, again.  Maybe relearning each other as people, with the grip of that motherfucking puppet all around but loose enough to breathe through.  Dave said he wasn’t ready, yet – ready to face him, to see him differently if he could.  To let what their lives had been in that dim, puppet snuff-film studio of an apartment become something anything like separate than who Dirk Strider could have been beneath all that.  If things had been different; if all those dusty souls bundled up into blue plastic eyes could’ve been kinder.

Maybe later, he said, once they’d done what needed to get done.  Terezi nodded, and assured him she’d suspected he would say something like that.  But _also_ that she remembered him well enough…  And had been led on a fun enough chase only recently…  That she would be there to work with whatever Future Dave needed to do.  Maybe she even had some ideas what that would be, and what sort of puppet-destroying tactics it might involve.  Could be, Gamzee thought.  Could be. 

First, they would carry themselves as fast as motherfucking possible to the gauzy space between universes.  First, Dave and Terezi would get everyone to watch the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff movie all together, this time with lots of impromptu director’s commentary.

The journey back to that unstable shortcut between realities seemed like it fell together faster than the trip out to Earth had, before any of the Red Team had known what the fuck their impossible planet would be like.  Whether Earth soda would suck, and what sort of starving leviathans were coiled all ponderous and waiting in its motherfucking oceans.  All that noise.  Maybe it was the loud warmth of their ship-hive that made things feel short and close, everyone all full of nervous anticipation and John Egbert testing out his windy Heir of Breath powers and/or playing a lot of human movie scores on the piano.  They were all training, because Her Imperious Condescension wasn’t gonna bend to Feferi’s challenge easy.  All Terezi’s Seer of Mind powers screamed that much, and they’d only just recently had _an actual Terezi_ corpse to deal with, drilling in how intense that Seer of Mind shit actually was.

(Gamzee wasn’t sure what’d happened to the Terezi corpse, actually, just that it was there one second and then, bam, it wasn’t.  Who the fuck even knew how timeline alterations worked?  Like, really _knew_.  Maybe Dave and Aradia, sure, but when Gamzee’d asked Aradia was like, “Mm, I dunno!  How spooky!” and Dave just wiggled his fingers like some kinda magician.

Time, man.  Motherfucking _time_.  Gamzee told himself maybe Terezi’d taken care of her own corpse somehow – maybe she’d done whatever the fuck she somehow knew the other version of herself would have wanted?)

Anyway, John’s metal fingertips plinked against the piano keys every now and then, joints moving all fluid and spectral-smooth, and Rose taught her slimy tentacle-cat Fiduspawn to do a cutesy impression of the horrorterrors’ whispering that really freaked out Jade’s dog-lusus.  They traveled together, and left their clothes dropped accidentally in the hallway.  They tried out each other’s video games and sparred with Equius’s gang of melted-back-together robots, getting ready for whatever pain was waiting for them in the Condesce’s space.  They pinned up even more paintings and inside jokes along the ship’s walls.

Tavros ended up sensing the stir of beast-minds – of life – on one of that quiet galaxy’s moons, too…  Orbiting some planet Jade called “Jupiter.”  They spent a while studying the way it twitched and grew beneath so many miles of ice, as Jade scribbled notes on whatever paper she could find and took computer readings with her glasses all finger-smudgy and a definite science-y spark in her eye.  Tavros whispered to the thing, and it whispered back, communing with a being nothing beyond its world had ever truly known before.  At least, so far as they knew?  The Alternian Empire wasn’t exactly famous for its science recon missions.  Gamzee could think of a lot of species culled before troll encyclopedias agreed on how to spell their motherfucking names.   

Sometimes, Gamzee spent hours listening to Karkat talk through what all he hoped their lives would be like, someday.  When they were back on Alternia and hopefully making it something like their own.  What sort of military leader he thought maybe he could become, championing Feferi’s cause – all of their cause! – and trying to change shit around into what it had never fucking been before in any of their lived-out universes.  It hadn’t been too long ago he’d wanted to swing his sickles for the Empress herself, harvesting whoever stood in her way like so much screaming wheat.  Karkat wondered aloud about that, pacing and running stubby, very warm claws through his sticking-up hair.  Gamzee murmured how he got it, brother, and how he was pretty motherfucking amazed himself at all the new shit they were becoming.  It all felt so real, now that they’d recruited Earth’s heroes.  Now that the Red Team’s mission was drawing to an end.

Terezi said a lot of the choice-paths she saw showed Karkat in a leadership role like what he’d always tried to demand from the world, and sometime very soon…  But maybe not _quite_ the way he’d imagined it.  And that was strange, you know?  Miraculous and strange.  It was hard to think Gamzee might be able to make himself into a priest but not one of the Empress's Subjugglators, too; a clown grown up faithful to those laughing doctrines but not only hatched to tell Her Imperious Condescension's jokes.  To smear motherfuckers’ brains around whenever she said and call it holy gospel. 

There was more to Karkat’s drive and ambitions than the medals he imagined up for his coat; there was more to Gamzee’s faith than the slaughter-frenzy that came to him like sleep or screaming, as ground-in as breathing or fizzing purple tears.  And all of it _could_ be in service to some kinda paradise planet.  All of it could be in honor of some greater truth they’d be able to choose and make for their own selves. 

Gamzee asked how Karkat felt about the future they were flying towards right that fucking second, and Karkat said of course he wanted it.  Had been wanting it for a while, now, since long before they’d left for Earth.  Long before he’d ever realized it, probably.  Except, he couldn’t help wanting to pick what was coming for them apart in his head before he knew all the motherfucking details…  Like analyzing conversations he hadn’t even had yet.  Except he knew how raw and crackling the wounds along Gamzee’s shoulder were, still, and he kept imagining him with a ton more just like them.  Berserker-rage so Gamzee wouldn’t even feel the pain, and he’d come back held together by the stretching of his own syrup-sticky blood.  So they’d all sacrifice and bleed for motherfuckers who’d come after them and maybe not even completely know about what they’d done.

Karkat ran the tips of his soft, rounded claws along Gamzee’s shoulder, stopping just before he got to wherever it’d been nearly ripped off.  He said, “Equius is right.  This _does_ look infected.”

And Gamzee knew his moirail would feel in control again, at least a little bit, if he got to dress the wounds up himself with all the right stinging smeary medicine bottles.  Gamzee winced a lot, meanwhile, and reminded Karkat how amazing he’d been on Earth.  Reaching out to Jade – the only one on their fucking ship who could’ve gotten to her! – and helping John meet his dad-lusus again.  Karkat “ _hmph_ ”-ed a little, but Gamzee knew the words were like shields he’d gather around himself, as they got closer and closer to that universe’s end. 

Whatever they’d become next – clown priests or generals, blaspheming Grand Highbloods or mutant-bright symbols of reinvention – Gamzee told Karkat he’d be able to curl up and talk with him about whatever the fuck he needed to.  A shoulder to lean on, as long as he wanted it.  Their diamond was strong, Gamzee said, and by now he really believed that shit.  They could be strong as the blood-slick highwire a laughsassin might sway up, up on, dancing with their victims as they held breathless and still like death. A laughing vertigo, sure, but if anyone cracked open against the confetti glitter of their tent floor it wouldn’t be the motherfucking _wire’s_ fault.

Karkat said, “I know that, Gamzee.  I’m here for you, too,” and his voice was so soft, answering fast and full of trust.  It caught Gamzee’s breath in his throat.  It got him slumped over in Karkat’s arms, curled up like he thought he was a hell of a lot smaller than he knew he’d grown.  It got Karkat rubbing the curve of his spine a little, chuckling to himself about how at least Future Karkat had _something_ sure and going for him.  The lucky bastard.   

Everybody was awake when they passed through from the human’s universe to that space between worlds, this time – that string of meteors where they camped and fought and killed each other all messy in Gamzee’s nightmares.  People felt the unforgiving wrongness in different ways, though.  Terezi said she smelled that sour-lime green sun, again; Dave said he suddenly _knew_ he was in the game where too many versions of himself had died.  Could feel it like an ache, like a stretching in his soul.  Gamzee, _Gamzee_ felt a little stifled rage.  Thought, _“I’m in that fridge, aren’t I, motherfucker?”_ before he realized just how completely that couldn’t be for his own true self. 

That other universe’s Gamzee _was_ in the fridge, though, when they peeked down to see where the meteor-world had gotten along in their stranger, realest timeline.  The refrigerator still smelled like the crumpled, sliced-up corpses that’d been squished inside it, too.  Gamzee knew without a doubt it did, and it was wrapped up tight with chains that scraped against each other like clubs dragging along the floor and leaving clotted-blood rivers behind them.  The thing was still wearing John’s dad-lusus’s cheerful fridge-magnets along its front, too, just the way he’d always known it would be.  Vriska Serket was sitting propped on the edge of that fridge, like she knew no murder clowns would _possibly_ break free and shove her right the fuck off.  And, of course, she was right.  Vriska talked with her hands, her expressions biting and practiced, polished up in a mirror for her FLARP-ing games. 

Just like last time, Gamzee watched their other lives unfolding below with Terezi at his side.  He asked, “Do you remember what Vriska’s all motherfucking talking about, on my fridge?”

And Terezi said, “No idea.”  Then, “Check out Rose and Kanaya.  I think they’re kissing like _humans_ do!”

Gamzee laughed, gentle and a little motherfucking surprised.  It was nice seeing Rose’s lacy, dripping Seer of Mind sleeve draped around Kanaya’s neck, after so long imagining it there.  After all the scenes dedicated to that undead, willowy moth-woman, floating her way through Rose’s novels and offering up measured, witty quips.  “They’re hardly even using fangs,” Gamzee said.  “Sorta feels like we should look away, or something.”

Out in their distant, too-chosen lives, Rose was murmuring something all tender and conspiratorial against the sharp grey of Kanaya’s cheekbone.  She would never have to want someone she’d never met so desperately, not in _that_ universe.  She wouldn’t have to taste what it was like to swallow down nostalgia for painted lips and needle-stubbed fingers there was no real chance to know.  That other Terezi cackled, too – wild and scheming as ever – at whatever mysterious thing Vriska had said, and Gamzee somehow felt himself shifting in the claustrophobic dark of his fridge.  He knew he saw shapes in that close-together emptiness, sometimes, that he was pretty sure couldn’t be real.  His eyes getting starved and desperate.  Learning to play tricks.

The Red Team passed through the void together, then, and they turned away from the lives they couldn’t live.  Terezi dashed off quick to help Equius pilot around a meteor that was gonna swoop in out of motherfucking nowhere right before they broke free; Gamzee went looking for Karkat just in case that other world’s guilt had come hunting for him again. 

Rose Lalonde got herself slowly ready to meet their own Kanaya, soon enough.  Soon, once they’d copied down all the secrets and binding-spells in that ghost tablet and returned it to its dead moon – to the spirits who’d asked Aradia to piece it back together in the first place.  Soon, once they’d pulled off whatever heists needed to get themselves up and done so they could make their way back home.  Soon.  She locked herself in her respite block for just a little while to write, anyway, while Jade, John and Aradia analyzed the readings their ship had picked up hurtling through non-space.  Lots of fascinating shit Gamzee didn’t completely understand, there – oozy horrorterror shadows, come a little unstuck and brushing against their hull like water weeds in the deep…  Something called drifting “Skaian Clouds,” with tiny gasps of future squirming inside them.

Rose reappeared from her respite block when all their Blue Team messages arrived, though.  Enough messages to account for so many nights gone…  Enough messages that Karkat swiped his sleeve across his eyes a couple times, reminding everybody how inane it would be to cry in one of his loudest voices.

They hadn’t been able to contact everybody back home yet, when it happened – they’d been suspended in an empty patch of space, just as solemn and stretching as any motherfucking other.  First their computer system pinged with a couple stray files: mostly snarky video diary updates from Sollux, arriving crackly and out-of-order.  They were meant for Aradia, of course, keeping her up-to-date on what all was going down around Alternia – and telling her matesprit-ish stuff every now and then, like that missing her felt like a computer with some of the cords unplugged and slithering away.  He said that kinda thing in a scratchy-strange voice Gamzee’d never imagined possible from him, with his psionics crackling like quiet thought behind his glasses.

There were photo updates from Nepeta, too, now and then.  She alerted Equius to all changes on her official shipping wall, of course – she was probably gonna be thrilled how Equius’d tended to his own shipping chart dutifully, just the way she’d asked him.  Gamzee’d been pretty motherfucking flattered when Equius had marked them in as pitch, so passionately he snapped the brush into a ton of brittle shards that had clung to the wet of his palm.  An audio recording from Feferi came in just before the eventual message-flood, when things were still very quiet on the whole: she welcomed all the human strangers into what might someday become her space.  Feferi’s voice was uncanny and echoing, now, as if bit by bit it was becoming inorganic.  Sticky and seeping as those horrorterror shadows along their ship’s hull, Gamzee thought, though she had nothing but the giggliest kind things to say.

The messages poured in, after that, so quickly Dave got fed up and turned off the excited pinging update-sound.  There were messages for everyone, and some just for _Gamzee_ , even.  From Vriska when she started FLARPing with a couple of the laughing faithful and wanted to pass along sarcastic anecdotes; from Eridan when he finally beat Sollux at a piloting sim they’d been fucking around with and he needed someone to brag to. 

Way back on Gamzee’s grey beach, sitting bent over himself under a dizzy, sopor-slurred sky, he never would have been able to picture himself where he was now.  A moirail leaning in by his twisted-up shoulder, laughing deep in his chest about some joke Sollux had sent him…  A kismesis trying again and again to contact Nepeta, murmuring such unspeakable expletives as “gosh-dang” and “fiddlesticks” in a voice that meant cold and noble-born murder.  And friends all around, brother.  Friends that would sew up Gamzee’s skin when it got tattered, friends that would put on rap-battle showdowns with him.  Friends who’d traveled nearly all the way from that uncreated, impossible planet by his side, without fucking off somewhere he couldn’t follow.  Who would’ve thought, after so long aching for anyone to wanna fucking talk to him, Gamzee’d end up with so many messages waiting in the deep of space?  Part of a team; hatched into a revolution.

Gamzee closed his eyes and breathed for just a second, as the ship rushed on around them all – inevitable and relentless as a wound-up murder doll, or maybe the Vast Honk to come.  He thought about the Blue Team they were headed home to see; he thought about Earth spinning in its far-off, broken universe.  He thought about all the reasons he should have felt fear swelling in the air just then, bleeding out of every mind there like they’d all just gotten their throats hacked to a motherfucking pulp.  But there wasn’t as much fear around as Gamzee might’ve thought, just then.  Not nearly as much as they’d all taste soon enough.  Trying to be something like the motherfucking good guys, in their Alternian Empire’s history.  Trying to think on something like mercy, and steal back a fucking galaxy.

After a while, Tavros tugged on Gamzee’s sleeve and said, “We’ve got a signal home!  Just… Just sort of…  For a second, maybe.  Wanna say hi?”

Gamzee said fuck yes he motherfucking did, and he thought he could hear the crooked smile in his teammate’s voice before he even opened his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But wait! COME JOIN US AGAIN IN… “THE STOLEN GALAXY!” Coming soon to an internet near you.
> 
> (I AM working on chapter 1 of the next fic in this series~ I'm hoping to start posting it on Sundays, too!)  
> Thank you, again. :’) I hope you’re having a wonderful day!!


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